Fides Testi’s Use of the Airbrush in Italian Art Textiles in the 1930s

Lucia Mannini

doi:10.3390/arts7040096

Abstract

The Modernist aesthetic, which spread all over Europe and in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, found the airbrush decorating technique to be the ideal instrument for expressing the requirements for an extreme synthesis of form. This was considered an essential element of the style, thanks to the areas of uniform color that shaded lighter tones inside basic, often geometric, shapes. The airbrush was used in that period mainly for graphics and for decorating ceramics, but it was also employed in other fields such as textile design. In Italy, the airbrush technique became popular in various artistic sectors including textiles, both for mass production and in the creation of single artistic pieces and in this latter field, Fides Testi was a leading figure.

Highlights

Studies that aim to investigate the feminine avant-garde of the 20th century have become more numerous as well as more known
Fides Stagni should be included among the female figures who played a role in Italian decorative arts just after the war
She received a traditional education in Bologna at the Accademia di Belle Arti but became an advocate of Second Futurism, arriving to Rome around 1928 with her husband, the painter

Summary

Introduction

Studies that aim to investigate the feminine avant-garde of the 20th century have become more numerous as well as more known. Fides Stagni should be included among the female figures who played a role in Italian decorative arts just after the war She received a traditional education in Bologna at the Accademia di Belle Arti but became an advocate of Second Futurism, arriving to Rome around 1928 with her husband, the painter. As the ads of the time tell us, confirmed by the products themselves, airbrush decoration was practical advantages to the artistic industries It is not surprising that spray decoration in Italy while it exalted the aesthetics of the machine, it encouraged the modern artist to use new materials was used mainly in the cultural environment of the so-called second Futurism: while it exalted the and techniques, like that of the airbrush.

Instructions painting from from aa 1936

Nicolaj

Some silksilk fabrics printed by Elio

Methodology

Conclusions