La Aventurera: Roberto's Marionette Cover for the 1927 La Farsa Zarzuela
La Aventurera is a Spanish zarzuela in two acts by José Tellaeche, with music by Ernesto Pérez Rosillo, published in 1927 as number 4 of La Farsa, Madrid's weekly theatre collection. Its cover, signed “Roberto”, shows a marionette couple in eighteenth-century dress, and it is the earliest of the seven La Farsa covers in our collection. As a group, these covers are now prized as vintage Spanish poster art, works of Spanish Art Deco made for the kiosk rather than the gallery.
Some businesses begin with a business plan. This one began with a stack of fragile paperback librettos at an outdoor book market in Madrid, in the shadow of one of the city's great museums. The booklets were issues of La Farsa, a weekly theatre collection from the 1920s, each one carrying a full Spanish stage work and a cover drawn in the boldest Art Deco style. They were not meant to survive. They were sold at kiosks for 50 céntimos, read, passed around, and thrown away. Finding a run of them together, nearly a century later, felt like finding a lost chorus line. Those booklets came home, became the first wall art we ever produced, and were the original inspiration for starting Vintage Print Project. This post is about the earliest of them, La Aventurera.
At a glance
- Published: La Farsa nº 4, Madrid, 1927 (Rivadeneyra)
- Libretto: José Tellaeche
- Music: Ernesto Pérez Rosillo
- Cover art: signed “Roberto” (identity unconfirmed)
- Style: Spanish Art Deco theatre booklet cover; vintage Spanish poster art
A Weekly Theatre You Could Carry in a Pocket
La Farsa began publication in Madrid on October 1, 1927, when its first issue, the comedy La Caraba, appeared at kiosks across the city. The publisher, Rivadeneyra, issued a new play or zarzuela every week, printed small enough to fit a coat pocket and priced at 50 céntimos so that anyone who had seen a production, or wished they had, could own the text. The collection ran for nine years and 463 numbers, an extraordinary archive of what ordinary Madrilenians actually watched on stage in the late 1920s and 1930s. La Aventurera was issue number 4, published within the collection's first month, which makes its cover one of the founding images of the whole series.
From the Collection
La Aventurera, La Farsa Cover Print, 1927
Cover of La Farsa nº 4 (1927): Tellaeche's zarzuela with music by Rosillo, drawn by Roberto.
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The Zarzuela: Tellaeche and Rosillo
The work inside is a zarzuela in two acts, written by José Tellaeche (1887 to 1948), with music by the composer Ernesto Pérez Rosillo, remembered on the cover simply as Maestro Rosillo. Zarzuela was Spain's own form of lyric theatre, part opera, part spoken play, part street song, and in the 1920s it still filled Madrid's theatres night after night. The title means "The Adventuress," and the cover gives us the essential scene before a note is sung: a self-assured red-haired gentleman in evening dress, hat in hand, and a lady in a vast plaid crinoline and pink bonnet ribbons who is quite clearly deciding whether he is worth her time. Period dress on a 1927 cover was itself a kind of nostalgia. Madrid audiences of the jazz age loved a costume romance set in the century before their own.
The Kiosk Culture of 1920s Madrid
To understand what this little booklet was, it helps to picture how Madrid read in 1927. The city ran on cheap print. Newspapers were hawked on corners, novels came out in weekly installments, and theatre, the era's mass entertainment, was published almost as fast as it was performed. Rivadeneyra, the house behind La Farsa, was one of the great Spanish printing firms, and the collection applied industrial logic to culture: a standardized pocket format, a fixed price of 50 céntimos, a new title every week, and a cover drawn to stop a passerby at the kiosk. Readers bought the libretto of a show they had just seen as a souvenir, or of one they could not afford to attend as a substitute, and many collected the series in bundles the way later generations collected records.
That disposability is exactly why survivors are rare, and why the survivors tend to travel in packs. A bundle tied up by one collector in 1928 might sit in a family library for ninety years and then surface whole at a bookstall, which is very plausibly the biography of the set that founded this shop. Madrid's outdoor book trade is old enough to have sold these booklets twice, first as secondhand reading in the 1930s and again as collectibles in our own century. The Aventurera copy that anchors our print still carries the ink signatures of earlier owners on its cover, a small reminder that before it was wall art, this object had a social life.
Roberto and the Marionette Look
The cover is signed, at the lower right, with a single name: Roberto. He was one of the illustrators in Rivadeneyra's orbit, part of the same stable that supplied the publisher's humor weekly Gutiérrez alongside names like Penagos and Barbero, and antiquarian catalogues credit La Farsa front covers to him in this period. His full identity has so far resisted research, which was not unusual for the commercial illustrators of the day, who signed with a single name and were paid by the piece. What he left on this cover is unmistakable. The figures are built from flat, unshaded shapes, a green tailcoat here, a yellow skirt there, with faces reduced to a few theatrical strokes. Look at the thin lines that fall from the top of the composition, past the couple and out of the frame. The lovers are drawn as marionettes, puppets on strings, which is both a joke about the artificiality of stage romance and a perfect piece of graphic shorthand for a theatre booklet. Our own copy of this issue carries two more signatures in ink across the lady's skirt, apparently reading Moyano and P. Olmedo, most likely autographs gathered by an early owner. The print reproduces the published cover as it left the kiosk in 1927.
How a Cover Like This Was Printed
La Farsa was a product of Rivadeneyra, one of Spain's great printing houses, and its covers were printed in the flat color manner that defined European commercial art between the wars. The illustrator's original would have been painted in gouache, opaque watercolor that photographs and separates cleanly, at or near the size of the finished booklet. From that original, the print shop prepared one printing surface for each color in the design. In this period that might still mean lithographic stones, though metal plates and photomechanical line blocks were steadily taking over in busy commercial shops. Either way, the principle was the same one that had built the great age of the color poster: black for the drawing and lettering, then a small number of unmixed inks, laid down one pass at a time, in register.
That constraint is the style. With only a handful of inks worth paying for on a 50 céntimo booklet, the artist could not blend or shade his way out of a weak drawing, so the drawing had to do everything: silhouette, pattern, and flat contrasting color. Roberto's green tailcoat and yellow skirt are not simplifications of a richer picture. They are the picture, engineered for the press from the first sketch. Even the paper played its part, cheap and absorbent, drinking the ink slightly and softening every edge, which is why original La Farsa covers have the matte, chalky surface that the textured restoration of our print works to preserve.
Why This Cover Matters to Us
Every collection has a first object, and this is ours. The Aventurera booklet was part of that Madrid market find, a rare little group of La Farsa issues that had somehow stayed together through a century of house clearances and flea markets. Reproduced at poster scale, Roberto's flat color and puppet strings hold up remarkably well, because the drawing was always graphic design first and illustration second. The whole La Farsa set from that find is gathered in our Spanish Art Deco collection, and the story continues with the chorus line of Las Alondras, drawn by a La Farsa regular whose name we do know. For more on the collection itself, the collector Santiago Navas Fernández has documented the complete run at his La Farsa exhibition page.
Part of our series on vintage Spanish Art Deco and the La Farsa covers, the seven booklets that started Vintage Print Project.
