Spanish Art Deco Poster No. 2: Two Profiles in Rose and Blue
Two faces, one breath apart. A large profile in cream, its eye drawn with a whole fan of lashes and a single perfect circle of rose on its cheek, leans across the frame until it nearly meets a second, smaller profile nested inside its own, and the poster holds them there, forever on the verge of the kiss the plot requires. This is Poster No. 2 of our Spanish Art Deco series, new designs created in the language of the 1920s zarzuela cover, and it takes as its subject the zarzuela's favorite event: the duet, the moment two people sing at each other until the distance between them closes.
The series companions the genuine La Farsa covers in our collection, the painted booklets of 1927 to 1929 whose story we tell in our history of the zarzuela covers. Where those covers illustrated specific works, the numbered posters illustrate the genre itself, its stock of feelings. No. 2 is the romance, abstracted to two profiles and a held breath.
From the Collection
1920's Spanish Art Deco Wall Art Vintage-Inspired Poster No. 2
Two overlapping profiles in dusty rose, blue grey, and cream, nearly touching.
From $34.50 · Free shipping
VIEW THE PRINTPrint Details
- Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², with pigment inks
- Unframed: 12″ × 18″ or 24″ × 36″
- Framed in Black, Red Oak or White Ayous wood, ready to hang
- Printed on demand; allow 5 to 12 business days for delivery
Keep Reading
The World Behind the Design
The zarzuela ran on couples. For every premiere the Madrid weeklies announced, there was a pair of lovers at the center, separated by a misunderstanding in act one and united by a duet in act two, and the cover artists learned to paint that arc in a single image: two profiles, angled toward each other across a field of flat color. Antonio Barbero's cover for Las Alondras, the larks, does it with two young singers and a whole sky of longing.
No. 2 pushes the formula to its Deco limit. The profiles do not merely face each other; they interlock, the smaller face drawn inside the contour of the larger, like a thought inside a head. It is the duet rendered as geometry, two voices occupying one shape, which is of course what a duet is.
Reading the Poster
The big face gets the poster's most theatrical makeup: an eye in grey shadow with lashes like a fireworks burst, an eyebrow arched to a fine point, and that impossible circle of rose on the cheek, blusher applied by a geometer. The smaller profile answers in a quieter key, downcast lashes, a mouth of deep red left slightly open, mid-phrase. She is singing. He, or the larger she, is listening with an entire face.
The palette is the romance's weather: dusty rose for warmth, blue grey for the evening, cream for skin and paper, everything softened by the series' weathered surface, scratched and faded like a cover that was read on the tram home and kept. Nothing in the design is sharp except the feeling.
The Duet
Ask a zarzuela lover what the form is for and the answer, sooner or later, is the love duet, the dúo in which the soprano and tenor stop circling and finally harmonize, usually in a garden, often beside a fountain, always a beat later than the audience wants. Composers from Barbieri to Guerrero built careers on that beat of delay. The poster, which cannot sing, paints the delay instead: profiles aligned, mouths open, the kiss deferred by exactly one centimeter of cream.
It is a surprisingly exact image of how the genre works. Zarzuela romance is never consummated in the picture; it is promised, harmonized toward, held in suspension by plot and propriety. No. 2 hangs happily in that suspension forever, which may be the most romantic thing a poster can do.
Flat Color and the Weathered Surface
The design's tenderness is built from hard shapes, and that tension is pure Deco. Cheeks are circles, shadows are wedges, hair is a black slab, and yet the whole reads as soft, because the colors are the colors of dusk and old roses, and because the surface, scuffed like a much handled booklet, takes the edge off every contour. The series gives all six designs this weathered skin, a memory of paper and pockets and ninety odd years.
Printed at poster scale, the profiles become architectural, two faces the size of a window, still nearly touching. It is the quietest of the six designs and, in a room, often the one that stops people longest.
One of a Series
No. 2 belongs to the six numbered Spanish Art Deco designs, companions to the genuine La Farsa covers whose history we tell in the collection's story. Together the designs and the originals fill our Vintage Spanish Art Deco collection, where the romance, in both centuries, is still holding its breath.
