Salus 1922 - 1924

Curator: The visual strategy at play in this artwork certainly pulls the viewer in. I’m especially struck by its confident directness. Editor: Confident is one way to put it! I immediately find myself wondering about the subject. It feels almost like a hyper-feminized ideal—a kind of advertising-driven fantasy. Curator: That reading aligns with the period, I believe. What we’re looking at is a poster called “Salus,” dating from between 1922 and 1924. Leonetto Cappiello is the artist. And if my sources are right, the advertisement is for mattresses and cushions manufactured by the Fratelli Babini company. Editor: That makes sense. The positioning of the model, lounging on these large, vibrant cushions. It definitely leans into that idealized image, promoting comfort and luxury. The oversized cushions shaped like lips add a very bold, almost surreal element. The advertisement ascribes the product's purpose to beauty and idealized comfort in the viewer's subconsciousness. Curator: Indeed. We can talk about Art Nouveau’s visual vocabulary, which draws on the aesthetics of decadence. Cappiello, in doing so, actively plays with societal values of consumerism in the post-war era, and uses figuration to get the viewers attention by putting on display an upper class woman enjoying comfortable amenities and idealised beauty. The image implies who the target customer is, and thus, perpetuates these socio-economic boundaries in society. Editor: And thinking about the politics of imagery— it definitely promotes an exclusive lifestyle that may have been inaccessible for the wider population at that time. Did Cappiello's use of bold color palettes contribute to a certain kind of idealization, an attempt to shape how beauty was seen at the time? Curator: Color, combined with compositional techniques, really emphasizes accessibility in the consumer culture. The scale of “Salus” allowed for an art which speaks volumes. Its themes offer up important insights. Editor: Agreed. There’s a real complexity within Cappiello's bold strokes.