420 pp. - 763 colour and b/w ill. - softbound - printed 2010
Italian text

POSTCARDS
Art in postcards

Foreword by Paola Pallottino

In almost 800 reproductions - mostly life-size and in colour - graphic designers and painters, art historians and experts in visual communication, will find themselves in front of an astonishing and unexpected world of images and of a specific and often innovatory way of discussing them.

Various artists - Lautrec to Mirò, Schiele to Balla, Picasso to Warhol - have created postcards and many graphic designers, often remained unknown, have reached tops of creativity. An innovative analysis of this image support brings forward the relationships between high and low culture, compelling to rethink about the relationships between art and mass media. Enrico Sturani, the main expert of the "postcard case", reconsiders some of the fundamental ideas in history of art in the light of this peculiar "Cinderella's shoe". Postcards, accepted and understood in their specificities are rescued for the first time from any inferiority complex towards Art.

The universe of images and visual culture, watched through postcards, reveal themselves as a whole world structured by its own specific laws. Art Nouveau and Futurism, up and down, recto and verso, writing and figure, fiction and advertising works, artists and graphic designers interfere, alternate and exchange roles. It is a real challenge of creativity and imagination: "postcard style" iconographical traditions are destroyed, and artistic avant-gardes sometimes find sources of inspiration right in the most commercial subjects.