Alfonso Iannelli's most important graphic work,
The Orpheum Vaudeville Posters 1910 - 1915

Excerpt from Alfonso Iannelli: A Modern Universe by David Jameson

ORPHEUM POSTERS 1910 - 1915
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Only in retrospect can any artist know when he had turned a corner to find the path to his future. Perhaps Alfonso Iannelli's most important turn was his job fabricating the stained glass window for the Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles. After witnessing his talent, the owners of the Orpheum circuit asked him to paint lobby "showcards" for the traveling vaudeville acts. For five years, working from 1910 until 1915, when he permanently moved to Chicago, Iannelli's nearly 100 painted posters became his earliest, and perhaps greatest contribution to the development of Modernism.

"Following my quest of doing problems that were of immediate necessity to the people, I undertook to make the posters for the Orpheum Theatre, four or five a week, which were displayed in the Italian Renaissance lobby--five frames on each wall--five of the coming attractions and five of the running."

Rectangular cut-outs in each of the tempera and metallic ink paintings permitted the management to insert the changing dates of their appearances whenever the acts returned to the Orpheum.

When the management offered him the opportunity to produce these lobby advertisements, he approached it as just another illustration job. "These were showcards when I first saw them, but it seemed to me this was a wholly proper field for an artist to solve quickly and the legitimate avenue for the best work of any artist."

Coming from his illustration background in Cincinnati and New York, having worked for clients unused to pushing the accepted boundaries, his early posters were more charming than avant-garde. He painted Sarah Bernhardt, performing in Los Angeles in one of her numerous "farewell" tours, in soft pastels and fur. But even in this sea of froth, he crowned her face with a frizz of flaming red hair.

“The early efforts at my analysis of the poster was the use of flat tones of tempera colors on tone backgrounds--lettering arranged as part of the design achieving a mood relevant to the subject.”

The metal lobby frames displayed the posters as linked pairs of which Iannelli took full advantage. Some of his early tracing paper studies showed arrangements down the wall that geometrically linked each subject to the next, carrying over one background motif or line into the adjacent poster.

"At one point of the development a metamorphosis took place wherein the applied forms of color were seen as a coordinated part of the total area and all of the spaces of color and background areas worked together so each played its part in the scheme, lettering included."

Iannelli flooded the lobby with triangulated faces, crossword puzzle costumes and asymmetrical blocks of vivid, saturated colors. Fred Kornau, the Viennese whistler, was depicted as a scarlet slash of a bird perched on a cubist tree branch. Iannelli rotated crimson and green triangles to clothe Louis London in his Indian blanket and headdress. And the hats of Gus Edwards' Matinee Girls became a collision of trapezoids. The more obscure the act, the more he would contort his images into a near psychedelic abstraction.

"From this point the work was more satisfactory. Careful consideration of colors, their value in depth from the front plane so the poster achieved the self-contained surface and volumes in space."

A GRAMMAR OF GEOMETRY

If art is, essentially, language, then Iannelli was creating a new dialect with geometry as its grammar. For Meehan's Canines, he overlapped arcs of leaping hounds in orbit around a golden circle to promote a simple dog act. He stood Bertish, the Strongman hieroglyphically profiled, his triangular torso surmounted by such a chiseled skull, that the descriptive words become superfluous. In an era when a monologist in black face could build an act around the then incongruous idea of a well-dressed Negro, Iannelli's poster for Lew Hawkins made a degrading cultural swipe into something heroic and stylish. Top-hatted, cape trimmed with zipper-like fur, this minstrel looks down at the lobby crowds through a monocled eye while elegantly removing his gloves.

Saturated in blocks of color or pulsating checks, his posters distilled each entertainer into building blocks of hands and faces, gesture and reaction. No sense of perspective was allowed to distract the viewer from the flat, geometric essence of “performance.” The little Italian immigrant had sought an "American art form" all his working life, seeing the artist as an interpreter to industrial society. Ever since his parents brought him from the dusty hill town of Andretta near the turn of the new century, he labored to fit himself into his adopted home. This, however, can't explain his astounding graphic maturity while still so young. His work consistently elevates even the weakest acts into a level of finesse and sophistication.

One important reason why the Orpheum posters rose above the standard set by contemporary illustration could have been the synergy between Iannelli and his new partner.

MARGARET

Margaret Spaulding was a teenaged student of his who possessed an innate talent for illustration and a like minded interest in Modernism. She had earlier studied fashion design in New York before moving to St. Louis. Now she was living with her mother in Los Angeles, searching, like Iannelli, for a fresh start.

Little is known about their early relationship, but she must have captivated his sense of design as she joined him in establishing “The Iannelli Studios” before the end of 1911.

Referring to the Orpheum posters:“As the experiments progressed, the shapes became simpler, the colors clearer, until the forms were geometricized in pure colors.”

Left unsaid was that he had found a design harmony in working together with Margaret. Whether it was romance that inspired creativity or vice versa, something changed for Iannelli. His personality had never allowed for any design partnerships before. And though he later acknowledged a brief marriage in 1909 to a woman named Julia Percy, he’d never let personal feelings interfere with his art.

KLIMT INFLUENCE

Unlike Gustav Klimt’s creation of a universe of surreal geometry peopled by more or less representational figures, Iannelli’s abstracted faces and bodies rendered the performer unrecognizable yet illuminated his stage character with a few deft strokes. His illustrations shared characteristics with Koloman Moser, the co- founder of the Vienna Werkstatte. But where Moser’s figures seem to be cold, analytical abstractions, Iannelli’s female faces
possessed a “charm” not even found in his earlier New York sculptures. So it’s quite possible that through Margaret’s influence, his purely scientific search for a new American form had discovered a far more humanist formula. The obvious parallel is to the symbiosis of Scotland’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh with Margaret McDonald. The Scottish pair shared such a unified design sense that it’s often pointless to discern who was responsible for which motif. The difference, though, is that Mackintosh credited his wife for her contributions.

"Like the scientist, the artist must start with analysis and determine scientifically the form of his expression once the nature of the medium has been analyzed."

Whether or not Margaret was the partner or the student, these were graphic illustrations boldly reveling in their two dimensions, yet conveying the exuberance of music, dance and variety acts in a simple visual plane. With these posters, Iannelli felt he had "...developed
a scientific method of handling this medium to express the vaudeville spirit."

A NEW MODERNISM

Iannelli's Orpheum posters gave vaudeville audiences a tangible advertisement for a new Modernism just flowering in avant-garde circles. The vibrant, geometricized figures he painted to represent the usual dog acts, comedians and trick whistlers on the circuit
lined the theater’s lobby with abstractions never before seen by California’s theatergoers. Faces were mere shards of black and red. Props and costumes were merged into an hallucinogenic flash of character.

In 1972, Sharon Goldman Rubin wrote her Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Minnesota Graduate School. Her thesis, Alfonso Iannelli: The Career of an Artist in the American Social Context 1906-1965, became the first academic study of Iannelli’s career. She contrasted his Orpheum illustrations to those of his contemporaries: "In comparison with American poster artists, Iannelli was even more original. A comparison of his work with the typical poster of the time, exemplified in the World War I posters reproduced in The American Poster, show nothing even slightly resembling it. Howard Chandler Christy, James Montgomery Flagg, Eugenie de Land, J.C. Leyendecker, Henry P. Raleigh, Charles Livingston Bull and Hazel Roberts all produced popular posters with realistic or sentimental figures, naturalistic colors, a variety of type styles (often in the same poster), and little integration of pictorial design with lettering. Although not lacking in commitment, these posters were in no sense simplified, modern designs."

NOT A POSTER MAN

Iannelli created some one hundred posters for the Orpheum Theater between 1910 and 1915. And though his friends urged their publication, he resisted, not wanting to be tainted forever as a "poster man." It was this need to be seen as an original artist that, ironically, buried his future reputation for generations. If only he had allowed his images to multiply throughout the Orpheum circuit or in later publications, the posters he created in that five year span would have certainly been rediscovered during the boom years of the 1960s. And "Iannelli", so artfully lettered in the corners of each of these lobby sheets, would have meant gold to the later generations of collectors, ranking with A.M. Cassandre, Will Bradley or Alphonse Mucha.

ANALYSIS

Dr. Rubin examined Iannelli's artistic progression from the time of his arrival in Los Angeles in 1910 to his move to Chicago in 1915: “Although his work with Frank Lloyd Wright, which began in 1914, helped Iannelli to conquer the possibilities of geometry, he was well on his way to accepting the implications of geometric form before meeting with Wright. In an early essay on the possibilities of commercial art in California, Iannelli analyzed the phenomenon of cubist art. Although people were considering cubism the 'newest thing,' according to Iannelli, it was really the oldest method of expression in the world. 'It began with old Mother Nature herself-- have you not noticed that when Nature gets half a chance to express herself, she GEOMETRICIZES herself--chrystalizes herself-in other words CONVENTIONALIZES herself.' Iannelli explained how the Egyptians, the Japanese, the Aztecs and the North American Indians had all utilized the geometric forms of the circle, triangle and square, derived from such natural phenomena as the shape of the sun."

Rubin continues: "Iannelli felt that the type of modern poster he was creating was able to convey its idea more clearly, and to express its spirit most sympathetically by conventionalizing through geometry: 'Every movement that a person makes is traceable to a certain CIRCLING action if I may so express it--and if you wish to interpret that action, it is necessary to analyze it, find the BASIS of the action, the SPIRIT of it, and conventionalize it.'"

CHICAGO POSTERS

Six of the Orpheum posters were finally reproduced as multiples several years after Iannelli’s death. In 1969, the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation arranged with the two Iannelli children to publish a selection for sale in the Foundation’s shop at Chicago's Glessner House, a magnificent Richardson structure on Prairie Avenue. Intended as a fundraiser to maintain the Iannelli archives, the six, published in an edition of 1,000, were: "Billy B. Van,""Meehan’s Canines,”""Alice Lloyd,""George Whiting/Sadie Burt,""Three Beautiful Types" and "Big City Four."

Printed in silkscreen on heavy white paper, the six reproductions used rich, clear pigments and heavy gold metallic ink that beautifully and accurately captured the saturated tones of the originals. Lacking Iannelli's brush strokes, they are truer to his intent as flat distillations of figuration and are, perhaps, more powerful graphic works because of it. They were priced to sell at $6.00 apiece or $25.00 for the set to members of the Foundation.

As the posters became known, Iannelli's name was never forgotten to the few who bought them. In time, they would be found in antique shops and sold as "original" posters of early Art Deco vintage. The monogram,"Iannelli," became a mystery to later buyers, unaware of his history. Perhaps it was this mystery attached to the strange beauty of the re-discovered posters that somehow kept his name from being entirely forgotten. Research led nowhere for those who cared to look as few libraries included references to Iannelli.

LEGACY

It seems fitting that this Italian immigrant, so anxious to fit into his new world that he yearned to express a truly American art form, defines the paradox that propels this culture. Iannelli was composed of just the right ingredients of innate talent, a drive to define his
place in art and the perspective of an outsider. Unencumbered with tradition, his sense of the new was perfectly timed with the marketing of Vaudeville. The Orpheum posters are a keystone of Modernism and prefigure his later designs for illustration, architecture and packaging.

A sculptor first and foremost, it was his talent as an illustrator that fueled his expression of contemporary life. Iannelli's Modernism, though certainly influenced by European illustration and Margaret’s sense of whimsy, was more the result of an architect's point of view: looking at the world through some universal grid that directs his every line but is invisible to everyone else. His Orpheum posters place him squarely at the vanguard of American Modernism years before the 1913 New York Armory show officially gave birth to the concept of "Modern Art" in America.

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