Marcello Dudovich (Trieste 1878 – Milan 1962)
Assicurazioni Generali Venezia advertising poster, depiction of the so-called “San Marco’s Column”
1932
chromolithography
cm 140×100

Over the course of a decade, Dudovich would produce a respectable quantity of posters for Generali, often featuring Venice and its lagoon as symbols of centuries of enterprise and robust economic foundations.

In his 60-year-long career, Marcello Dudovich lived through the whole life cycle of poster design, leaving a lasting and unique mark.

His had a prolific career filled with collaborations, assignments and initiatives that brought him success as an illustrator of magazines, books, sheet music and postcards, not to mention as a painter.

His creative genius is inextricably intertwined with the Ricordi publishing house in Milan and Mele, a Naples-based agency.

In the 1920s, he founded the Star publishers in Milan, for which he would contribute a number of posters, distributed by IGAP (Impresa Generale Affissioni e Pubblicità, “the General Agency for Billposting and Advertising”), for whom Dudovich was the artistic director. In the early 1920s, a long and fruitful collaboration was also born with La Rinascente in Milan, but there are so many industries, so many companies (to name but a few: Alfa Romeo, Pirelli, Shell, Agfa Film, Bugatti, Fiat, Martini, Campari and Generali) and so many events in the 1920s and 1930s for which he created posters and other advertising materials, whilst never neglecting his work as an illustrator for books and magazines.

During the Second World War and throughout the 1940s, Dudovich increasingly dedicated himself to painting, in particular tempera, with production of many solo exhibitions and participation in exhibits, all in increasing numbers over the years. During this period, he would also carry out mural decorations at the homes of various friends.