Catalogue Number
NMLH.2022.131
Object Name
Poster
Title
Italian Socialist Party Poster - explanation of collection
People
Bettino Craxi
Date
1980
Description
This poster is part of a collection of 100 posters designed by Ettore Vitale for the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) between 1973 and 1991. The posters promote a range of events and campaigns using the colours of the Italian flag- red, white, and green, along with motifs of carnations, rainbows, and stars. This poster is titled "l'immagine socialista cento manifesti disegnati da ettore vitale per direzione del partito socialista italiano" which translates to "the socialist image one hundred posters drawn by ettore vital for leadership of the italian socialist party." This poster has a white background and is full of black text - this is in Italian. The text is an introduction to the collection. The English translation of this text is as follows - "in the PSI, starting from the seventies, coinciding with the political and organizational renewal of the party, substantial changes took place with respect to the way of communicating, the formulation of messages and their realization, he noted that during the eighties they found further development for the effective and consequent way in which communication strategies are designed and implemented. Having entrusted the visualization of the political message to a professional qualified as Ettore Vitale was certainly an important fact: more important still was having continued a constant collaboration with him over the years, a continuity of the project that has borne considerable fruit and that is it has now become a point of reference above all for the consistency of the visual messages used. the coordinated image of the PSI, over the course of the octane years, has always been effective, rigorous, clearly recognizable and the quality has always been of a remarkable professional and cultural level, considered an innovative example of political and institutional graphics.an image strategy is necessary to correctly convey the political messages: in this sense, the work carried out in recent years has created a symbolic background that has in fact become the patrimony of the whole party, inseparable from its own strategies for success integration between political message and visual message, between communication content and form, of the communication itself. the result of this almost twenty-year collaboration of a professional directly involved in the formulation of the information strategy of the PSI is now an inseparable part of the history of the socialist image: just as one cannot speak of socialist satire without going with the thought to the essential and biting sign of Scalarani, equally one cannot speak of contemporary socialist manifestos without imagining the rigorous, simple, highly effective campaigns designed in recent years by a Ettore Vitale. This exhibition is a testimony and a commitment to continue with renewed creative impetus."
