Spanish Art Deco Poster No. 7: A Dance in Ribbons of Color
Somewhere inside the ribbons there is a couple dancing. An arm in teal, a skirt in rust, a face in gold tipped back with its mouth open, singing or laughing, the rest dissolved into black and blue green currents that move the way a dress moves at the height of a turn. This is Poster No. 7 of our Spanish Art Deco series, new designs created in the language of the 1920s zarzuela cover, and it is the boldest of the six: the dance of No. 4 abstracted one step further, until the dancers are mostly weather and only the joy is figurative.
The numbered posters companion the genuine La Farsa covers in our collection, the Madrid theatre booklets of 1927 to 1929 whose story we tell in our history of the covers. Those covers, painted by working illustrators to a weekly deadline, rarely dared this much abstraction. No. 7 dares it in their honor, asking how far the idiom stretches before the theatre lets go of the picture entirely. The answer the poster gives is: further than you think, and the picture holds.
From the Collection
1920's Spanish Art Deco Wall Art Vintage-Inspired Poster No. 7
A dancing couple abstracted into ribbons of black, teal, and rust.
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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
Spanish Deco was never only decoration. In the Barcelona and Madrid of the 1920s, illustrators absorbed Cubism and Futurism through the theatre's door, and the zarzuela cover, cheap, weekly, and everywhere, became an unlikely gallery of modern art, a place where a flower seller might be painted with a Cubist shoulder and nobody at the bookstall blinked. Our La Parranda cover keeps its figures whole, but its background already breaks into patterned planes, the modern seeping in at the edges.
No. 7 lets the seep become the flood. The couple is built the way the Futurists built motion, by repeating and bending the forms until the turn itself is the subject. It is the series' one essay in pure movement, hung among portraits like the orchestra's loudest number in a bill of songs.
Reading the Poster
The gold face at the top is the anchor, a profile in silhouette with an open mouth, the singer mid-phrase, around whom the teal arms and black currents organize themselves into something like an embrace at high speed. Below, the rust forms read as skirts and capes caught in rotation, edged with one bright line of gold that keeps the whole swirl from going dark. Your eye is not asked to assemble the couple so much as to follow them, which takes about as long as a turn of the chotis and feels about the same.
The surface carries the series' weather at its most visible, white flecks and scratches scattered like sparks across the black, so the abstraction gains a skin of age. It is a thoroughly modern composition wearing a ninety year old coat, and the coat is what makes it Spanish Deco rather than merely modern: the past, insisted upon, in patina.
The Dance Takes Over
Every zarzuela makes the same bargain with its audience: endure the plot, and the dance numbers will repay you. In the verbena scenes that crowned the sainetes, the bargain became the whole show, the stage filling with couples until the story dissolved, happily, into turning. Composers wrote those finales to be unstoppable, rhythm piling on rhythm, the orchestra sawing away while Madrid danced itself into the last act's resolutions.
No. 7 is that finale without the plot around it. Hung on a wall, it does what the verbena scene did in the theatre: it changes the room's tempo. The profiles and portraits elsewhere in the series hold still and are looked at. This one moves, and makes the looking move with it.
Flat Color and the Weathered Surface
The palette is the night festival abstracted: black for the street after dark, teal for the shadowed air, rust for lamplight on skirts, gold for the one face the light finds. Each form is flat, each edge is final, the series' lithographic discipline stretched over its most fluid drawing, so the poster feels simultaneously carved and poured.
It is also the design that best shows why the series weathers its surfaces. Against the black, the flecks of wear read as the dust of the dance floor itself, chalk and confetti ground into the paper of a programme kept from the best night of the season, which is, give or take the century, exactly what this new poster aspires to be.
One of a Series
No. 7 closes the six numbered Spanish Art Deco designs, contemporary companions to the genuine La Farsa covers introduced in our history of the collection. They share our Vintage Spanish Art Deco collection, where the ribbons keep turning at the end of the row, the last dance of the set.
