Spanish Art Deco Poster No. 3: The Shared Face
Look once and there is a face: a brow, an eye fringed like a sea anemone, a mouth the shape of a leaf. Look again and there are two, a pale profile and a terracotta one, fitted together along a single wandering line so that each woman's face completes the other's. This is Poster No. 3 of our Spanish Art Deco series, new designs created in the language of the 1920s zarzuela cover, and it is the series' cleverest construction, a double portrait in which the seam between the two sitters is the whole subject.
The numbered posters companion the genuine La Farsa covers in our collection, the Madrid theatre booklets of 1927 to 1929 introduced in our history of the covers. The originals illustrated libretti; the new designs illustrate the theatre's ideas. No. 3 illustrates its oldest one, that on a stage, no one is only one person.
From the Collection
1920's Spanish Art Deco Wall Art Vintage-Inspired Poster No. 3
Two women's profiles interlocked in a single composition of cream and terracotta.
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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
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The World Behind the Design
Doubling is the zarzuela's native device. The sainete, the short comic form that shared the bill, ran on pairs: two sweethearts, two rivals, the lady and her maid trading places, the heroine and her shadow. Cover artists compressed those plots into single emblematic faces whenever they could, and the bravest of them, the painters who signed the La Farsa covers we reproduce, learned to let one contour serve two characters, a trick our post on La Aventurera, the marionette cover, explores from the puppet side.
No. 3 makes the trick the entire design. There is no background, no scenery, no costume to tell the two women apart, only color, cream against terracotta, and the single line they share, which is also the line a stage audience draws between the actress and the role.
Reading the Poster
The pale face holds the detail: an eyebrow like a drawn bow, an eye whose lashes spike in every direction, lids lowered in the era's indispensable expression of knowing more than she says. Her mouth, small and leaf shaped and red, sits at the composition's edge, as if her line in the play were about to be spoken offstage. The terracotta face is her calm counterweight, mostly plane and shadow, an eye closed to a single stroke, presence without performance.
Because the two share one contour, the poster keeps flipping as you look, figure becoming ground and back again, the way a good sainete flips its sympathies. The weathered surface, rubbed and scratched across both faces impartially, finishes the thought: these are not two portraits but one piece of paper, one night at the theatre, remembered whole.
Two Women of the Zarzuela
The genre's women came in pairs often enough to be a system: the ingenue and the character actress, the lady and the dresser, the two flower sellers, the two sweethearts of two brothers. Los Claveles, the carnation sainete whose cover we reproduce, builds its Madrid out of such doublings, working women whose mirrored lives carry the comedy and the sentiment between them, a world we visit in our post on Los Claveles.
No. 3 gives that system a face, or rather two faces in one. Hung on a wall it behaves like the theatre itself at conversational distance: company, doubled; identity, negotiable; and underneath, the Deco faith that a single elegant line can hold more truth than a paragraph.
Flat Color and the Weathered Surface
Of the six designs, this is the most economical: two colors of skin, black for the features, red reserved for one small mouth. The flatness is the point. With nothing modeled and nothing shaded, the interlock has to work purely as drawing, and it does, the shared contour winding down the center of the poster like the border between two countries on a beautiful old map.
The series' weather lies lightly here, a scuff on the terracotta cheek, a fade across the cream, the patina of a booklet carried home in 1928 and, somehow, kept. It keeps the design from feeling like a puzzle and lets it feel like a memory instead.
One of a Series
No. 3 is one of six numbered Spanish Art Deco designs, contemporary companions to the genuine La Farsa covers whose story we tell in the collection's history. The designs and originals share our Vintage Spanish Art Deco collection, where this double face keeps its double counsel among the dancers and dandies.
