Artists working in the modern creative industries often have to abide to tight deadlines and, if they collaborate with the fashion or advertising industries, they are prompted and pushed to produce images at a very fast pace. Yet there was a time when artists were given longer deadlines to develop their work and could therefore create some correspondences between their paintings and their illustrations for the fashion or the advertising industries.
Marcello Dudovich for example obsessively developed more than just one sketch for a single illustration or he took photographs and then created a series of drawings. He then proceeded to strip down the various drawings of superfluous details to reduce them to more essential and striking lines.
This modus operandi allowed him to create correspondences between his art and his fashion illustrations or advertising posters. For example, the woman portrayed in "La Signorina dalla Veletta" (Veiled Lady, 1919-1920), a painting exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1920 that featured a woman in a long fur trimmed ensemble and a veiled hat, finds some correspondences in the cover Dudovich created for Italian magazine La Lettura in January 1923.
A more striking example of such correspondences is the portrait of Pina Brillante showcased at the Venice Biennale in 1922. In the painting Brillante wears an architectural minimalist dark evening gown cinched at the waist with a belt in a lighter colour. The dress is accessorised with long gloves and the ample boat neckline reveals one shoulder.
Dudvich did several studies showing details of a dress very similar to the one donned by Pina Brillante and he then replicated the model in the Renèe Maha poster he created for Italica Lux Films d'arte in 1922. Dudovich's method could be inspiring for artists and creative minds working in the fashion and advertising industries today as it could help them focusing on important details, but it could also prove intriguing for museum curators interested in spotting correspondences between art and fashion designs throughout the centuries.
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