''Mogambo'', 1953, movie poster painting by Ercole Brini

by Stars on Art

Title

''Mogambo'', 1953, movie poster painting by Ercole Brini

Artist

Stars on Art

Medium

Painting - Movie Posters

Description

Base painting of the vintage movie poster for ''Mogambo'', 1953, with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner.

Base art is the poster artwork after the text has been digitally removed. It thereby closely recreates the original painting used for the poster. As practically all those original paintings have been lost, a recreation attempts to display the original art before the movie studios added descriptive text. See also our collection "Movie Poster Base Paintings.

About the artist:

Ercole Brini (1913, Rome —1989. Rome) is noted for his bright, distinctive, watercolor style of painting portraits and full figures, having painted hundreds of movie posters in Italy. Brini produced many stunning images for the national film industry in Italy, alongside his contemporaries Alfredo Capitani, Luigi Martinati, and Anselmo Ballester.

From "The Bicycle Thief" to "Blow-Up," he added a touch of elegance to his romantic paintings — especially his striking, sophisticated portraits of women. Brini's style is characterized by evocative touches of color, quick brushstrokes, and stains that compose images with nuanced traits.

The colors are not pure, vivid, or pop: they strike the viewer for their half tones, creating a world made of shadings. In Brini's compositions the colors blend together, giving sketched images while maintaining the realism of the protagonists.

Among the most interesting subjects of Ercole Brini's production we certainly find his female portraits. The protagonists of Stromboli, Sunset Boulevard, Anna Karenina or The Velvet Touch take shape through patches of color, extremely bright and transparent. Through layers and glazes, his portraits almost make you think of suggestive watercolors, one of the favorite techniques of the painter along with tempera.

Looking at his movie posters, only apparently executed quickly and easily, the mind immediately flies to the Impressionists, such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, known for their female portraits with pastel colors and bright light effects. Like Renoir, Brini creates detailed and recognizable figures in close-ups, enhanced by white highlights, but he places them against less defined backgrounds. Like the Impressionists, Brini fixes on the canvas the still-image of a film, the impression of a moment, without minutely defining the contours. Leaving an echo.

However, there is another face of Brini that clearly transpires from the style of his artworks, and it does not draw on the world of impressions but on that of reality. In the post-war years, in Italy, neorealist cinema became particularly popular. It was a type of film production that dealt with subjects, stories and problems taken directly from real and everyday life, particularly that of the lower classes, with a preference for non-professional actors.

The period between 1945 and 1955, for Italian cinema a true Golden Age, was however a period of poverty, unemployment and injustice, but also of attempts at reconstruction and hope. Brini absorbed this cultural and social climate, devoted not only to denunciation but also to social commitment, and transposed it into his movie posters.

Search “Brini” to see more of his posters.

Uploaded

November 5th, 2022

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