The Colors Of Vittorio Fiorucci

"There are two types of people in the world, people who are themselves, and people who go through life pretending they are somebody else... they can never say I was never myself."

Vittorio Fiorucci was an Italian Canadian poster artist from Montreal, Canada.

Fiorucci was born on 2 November 1932 in Zara (Italy). During World War Two when Zara was about to be captured by Yugoslavia, Fiorucci and his family fled to Venice, Italy, where he subsequently spent most of his childhood before coming to Canada in 1951. By 1960, he was an established artist and by 1980 was one of the most renowned poster designers in the world.

Fiorucci was awarded a Moebius Award at the 1998 International Advertising Awards of Chicago, and lifetime achievement awards from the Canadian Association of Photographers and Illustrators and the Institute of Design Montréal. Fiorucci worked in a variety of mediums: he did illustration works for magazines (including the film magazine Take One), children's books, animation, and was an established photographer who was exhibited in 1958 at George Eastman House's International Exhibition of the World's Greatest Photographers.

His first poster was a handbill he designed in the spring of 1962 to advertise Norman Mailer's visit to Montreal. Then he did the poster for Claude Jutra's first film, À Tout Prendre. He was hired by the fledgling Montreal International Film Festival as art director and in 1964 won first prize in the Czech International Poster contest for his stylized portrait of an Italian Carbonari.

During his career  Fiorucci designed more than 300 art posters and turned out eight covers for Time magazine. His work is a combination of the bawdy and the beautiful, the comic and the sad. It is represented in the permanent collections  of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Poster Collection in Ottawa, the Toronto Metroplolican Library, and Montreal's Musée d'Art Contemporain.

His work was used to promote many of the films that marked the beginning of independent Québecois cinema, and appeared in magazines as varied as Time and (the cinema magazine) Take One. He created the logo for the Le Château chain of clothing stores, and the green mascot of the Just For Laughs festival. He died from a stroke on July 30, 2008.

Sources: Info Design Canada, cinematheque, Montreal Gazette

Text adapted from Wikipedia.