GRAPHIC DETAIL

OSVALDO VENTURI

NE OF THE MOST DISTINCTIVE STYLES IN movie poster art belongs to the Argentine artist Osvaldo Venturi (1900-89). With his brash brushstrokes, eccentric use of color, lurid subjects, and dramatic hand-lettering, that could hang alongside those outré master-pieces). Many of his subjects were home-grown melodramas, and his renditions thrum with passion and menace in the way many of the best Italian posters of the 1950s do (his oversize heads often have the wide staring eyes of Anselmo Ballester’s work). But Venturi was also the house artist for Guaranteed Pictures, a distribution company that brought old international films to Argentina in the 1940s and ’50s, so he made posters for films as diverse as Lewis Milestone’s , Jacques Becker’s , René Clair’s , Luchino Visconti’s , and Sergei Eisenstein’s . His poster for Howard Hawks’s features a burning-red Paul Muni dwarfing a city skyline. For Fellini’s , a cigarette-smoking beauty looms over the aimless provincial young men of the title. And for William Wyler’s , he painted a particularly demented-looking Laurence Olivier. He illustrated Gary Cooper and Laurel & Hardy numerous times, but Venturi’s most indelible poster is for the little-known 1933 Austrian sex-change drama (“Mystery of Sex”), which writhes with gender torment (and, for good measure, a snake).