Anatomia di un comitato

con grande grazie a Liberato Cardellini (traduzione)
Dipartimento SIMAU, Via Brecce Bianche, 12 – 60131 Ancona, Italy

L’antefatto

La famiglia di mio padre emigrò negli Stati Uniti intorno al 1900, dalla Sicilia, dove hanno vissuto fin dagli inizi del ‘600. In quel periodo, per la maggior parte del tempo, hanno abitato nella città costiera di Aci Catena, nella parte est della Sicilia. Prima di lasciare l’Italia, il mio bisnonno ha imparato il mestiere di fabbricare i sigari, e la famiglia ha intrapreso questo commercio quando è arrivata negli Stati Uniti.

Sono sempre stato un grande ammiratore del grande artista grafico, Alphonse Mucha. Era vivente e al lavoro a cavallo del secolo, spesso facendo manifesti stellari per la pubblicità.

Entra ora Esteban Maroto, un artista spagnolo contemporaneo che ha fatto numerose opere d’arte nei generi fantascienza e fantasia. Una delle sue opere ha attirato la mia attenzione: un manifesto pubblicitario in cui mi sono imbattuto. Immediatamente questo disegno mi ha spinto a contattare Esteban e proporre un comitato: cosa succede se Mucha avesse fatto alcuni manifesti pubblicitari per quei straordinari produttori di sigari siciliani, i Fratelli Coppola di Aci Catena?

Esistono delle foto della vetrina dei produttori Fratelli Coppola nella loro location degli Stati Uniti. La più antica è del 1903, quando parecchi di loro sono immigrati.

Qualche tempo dopo, come si può vedere nella prossima foto, il negozio è meglio costruito, e l’immagine completa del negozio di sigari mostra una statua, con la mano destra alzata e, presumibilmente tenendoci un sigaro. È un po’difficile da vedere, ma al centro della grande insegna sopra la porta è riportata una triskele (triscele), che è il simbolo al centro della bandiera siciliana.   

Nel 1938, il negozio ha continuato ad evolversi, e il nostro amico ha perso il suo braccio destro. Le prossime due immagini sembrano essere contemporanee. 

I sigari siciliani sono noti per la loro forma e dimensione, e per lo stile unico dei loro nastri che avvolgono i sigari, che sono oggetti da collezione.

L’idea

Volevo due poster, come se la campagna pubblicitaria potesse occupare le pagine faccia a faccia in una rivista, o che potessero essere visualizzati fianco a fianco come manifesti attuali. I pezzi fondamentali delle informazioni visive, ho proposto ad Esteban, avrebbero dovuto essere:

(1) doppi; i due manifesti avevano bisogno di essere uniti, tematicamente, così maschile e femminile è stata una scelta ovvia, con entrambi in abiti carnevaleschi esagerati

(2) storici; (a) la statua del ragazzo del negozio di sigari sarebbe stata una figura importante da integrare in qualche parte del poster; (b) il nome dello stabilimento, e il suo anno di fondazione fittizio, 1851, l’anno di nascita del mio bisnonno; (c) riportare la fascia che avvolge i sigari dei Fratelli Coppola, con la triskele, richiamando l’eredità siciliana, anche questa una finzione completa

L’esecuzione

Esteban rimuginò le mie richieste per un po’ e mi propose un grande piano. Avrebbe ampliato la dualità dell’uomo e della donna incorporando il sole e la luna con una tavolozza di colori corrispondentemente caldi e freddi. Ha mandato i disegni che seguono. Quello della donna era quasi perfetto (sbarazzarsi del bicchiere di champagne), e il logo avrebbe dovuto essere una rappresentazione più letterale di un nastro del sigaro.


Non mi importava della composizione del manifesto dell’uomo. Era troppo verticale e diviso, rigido, e non complementare al flusso eccezionale del manifesto della donna. Il tema del sole e della luna insieme è una grande idea, e si può vedere il vortice solare. L’integrazione della figura in uno solo dei manifesti piuttosto che in entrambi mi è molto piaciuta, e si può vedere l’inizio di quello che sarà un rapporto formidabile tra la figura e l’uomo.

Mi sono limitato a suggerisce l’idea di fare in modo che risultassero come una coppia e la congruenza del flusso compositivo; Esteban ha fatto il resto. E il ragazzo ha fatto centro. Ho pensato che la revisione era semplicemente grande. L’uomo ha perso il suo drink e il suo sigaro, e ora il ruolo del sole è quello di accendere il sigaro della figura. Semplicemente geniale!

La fanciulla parzialmente completata è arrivata per prima. È una composizione stupenda, con la sua marcata diagonale completamente integrata con il moto circolare del resto della pagina.

Quando l’uomo è arrivato, ho capito però che avevo fatto un errore. Avevo chiamato la figura del negozio di sigari una statua, e questo è stato un errore. Secondo quanto mi ha detto Esteban, il grigio è stato intenzionale, e non ho pensato che tanto contrasto avrebbe potuto funzionare.

Esteban ha voluto fare un tentativo, e ha promesso di pensare alla luce e ai riflessi. Il maggiore contrasto interno si presenta meglio, ma nel complesso il contrasto nella composizione non è stato, per me, una idea vincente.

Ho voluto dargli un paio di opzioni. Una idea era quella di attenersi alla statua monotono, ma di colmarla con i riflessi giallo-arancio che avrebbe dovuto da questo colore riflesso. Suppongo che non avremmo mai potuto sapere, da queste vecchie immagini, se la figura era dipinta oppure no, ma il look oltraggioso delle Guardie del Vaticano è un classico italiano. Per me, la campagna pubblicitaria vorrebbe il nostro amico in un abito pieno di colore; questa era la mia preferenza.

Esteban l’ha azzeccato!

“Fratelli Coppola (La Luna)” (2017)
di Esteban Maroto (1942-)
20 x 26 in., inchiostro, pennarello, acrilico e acquerello su carta pesante
Collezione Coppola

“Fratelli Coppola (Il Sole)” (2017)
di Esteban Maroto (1942-)
20 x 26 in., inchiostro, pennarello, acrilico e acquerello su carta pesante
Collezione Coppola

“Bishop Cannon” (ca. 1927)

“Bishop Cannon” (ca. 1927)
by Rollin Kirby (1875-1952)
10 x 14 in., grease pencil on textured board
Coppola Collection

At the time of his death, Rollin Kirby was considered the finest political cartoonist in America and had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times, including being the first such awardee, in 1921, 1924 and 1928.

Kirby was a staunch opponent to Prohibition, and created the character “Mr. Dry” in 1920 as the personification of the movement. In an interview, Kirby reflects,

Back in the days when Frank Irving Cobb was editor of the New York Morning World, out of the seething turmoil of the period when we were giving until it hurt, hunting out pro-Germans, and bands were playing Over There, there arose almost unnoticed by the press of America, a wartime measure to help win the war.

 Out of the confusion of the time it eventually became the Eighteenth Amendment. Tacked onto it was an act proposed by an obscure Congressman from Minnesota named Andrew Volstead.

 Finally the drum-fire ceased, the boys came home and the wayfaring citizen suddenly realized that something extraordinarily unpleasant had stepped into his life. His liberty had been curtailed, for one thing. He resented that. He also saw growing up around him a sinister, hardfaced gentry: the racketeer and the bootlegger.

 The tom-toms beat far into the night in the prohibitionists’ camps. They were jubilant, hypocritical, smug and above all else, insolent. They combined what they considered to be virtue with a thin-lipped savagery. They gloated and cheered when a rum-runner was murdered by a prohibition agent. They applied in so far as they were able the methods of Torquemada.

 The Methodist Church seized the gonfalon [BPC note: this word needs to be used more often] from the Anti-Saloon League and, aided by the W.C.T.U. and kindred organizations, swept up onto the barricades and thumbed their noses at the bewildered but extremely sore populace who stood huddled in impotent anger in the doorways. They took the Republican party by the scruff of its aging neck and licked all the fight out of it.

 But at the beginning of the debacle Frank Cobb and the World, backed by its owners, the Pulitzers, sailed into the fight.

 When the press of the country was lying supine under the hob-nailed boots of the Anti-Saloon League, that paper dared to say that the whole thing was vicious, un-American, economically unsound, and a fraud without parallel in our history.

 And I, as the political cartoonist, evolved a figure upon which we could hang our displeasure – a figure tall, sour, weedy – something to express the canting hyprocrisy we felt about the movement. And above all something to catch the quasi-ecclesiastical overtones inherent in the thing.

 This last element was filled with dynamite, for there is an unwritten law in the Fourth Estate that religion is a sacrosanct subject – that it is not a controversial topic and that any criticism, be it ever so oblique, must never enter into the news columns.

 However, Frank Cobb approved of the symbol I had evolved and we printed him.

 After that, the deluge. Letters from ministers, professional drys, Y.M.C.A. secretaries and the whole self-appointed crew of field marshals in the new dry army poured in on every point.

 But the World was a fighting paper and I drew him again and again. Upon our unbowed heads fell the bludgeonings of the Anti-Saloon League. The Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, Bishop Cannon, Mabel Willebrandt, and all of the hired tubthumpers of that unhappy epoch.

 Undaunted we kept on month after month and the attack never relaxed.

 Then one day in the exchange room of the World I picked up some out-of-New York paper and found a cartoon in which my figure had been used. It was not as anti-clerical as mine but the tall hat and the white tie and the long nose were there and he was labeled PROHIBITION.

 Some other editor had taken his courage in his hands and come out against the dragooning crowd we were fighting.

 And so, as public opinion changed, the more timid papers joined in with us and my puppet became a stock figure until along toward the end of the nobly intended experiment became as standardized as Tammany’s tiger or the G.O.P. elephant.

As the creator I have seen him change under my hand. He became steadily more furtive, more disreputable, crueler. And then, as the golden flood which once had nourished his veins was diminished, he became even more emaciated. No longer was he a dictator. He became snivelling and whimpering. He was broke. He, who once had browbeaten Senators, Congressmen, national conventions even, stood a patched, unshaven scarecrow holding out a battered tall hat for such largess as could still be wangled from credulous supporters.

 No longer was he a tyrant – he was simply an exposed humbug whose fall had nothing of dignity nor anything deserving of pity. And now he is in extremis. He lies on a broken pallet in a forgotten attic with his long, dank hair matted over his brow; his hollow, fanatical eyes burn in their sockets; the unshaven jowl has sunk to the contours of the bones; his clothes are in tatters and on the floor lie the broken tall hat and the skeleton of his umbrella. I shall miss him. He has been a good friend. Days when news furnished little, I could always take him out of his box and he danced to my tune.

James Cannon, Jr. was a pro-Prohibitionist who was appointed as a bishop in 1918. The position gave him platform of national influence towards ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920.

By 1927, and following the death of Anti-Saloon League leader Wayne Wheeler, Cannon was considered the most powerful leader of the temperance movement in the United States, so I have tagged the cartoon to this date as an estimate.

The fall of Prohibition in 1933 follows, at least in part, from Cannon’s highly visible fall from grace over significant corruption charges. In 1928, evidence emerged that he was involved with stock market manipulations, used church money to support the political opponents to Prohibition, and wartime hoarding of food staples. The charges against him grew faster than his friends could deny them.

Although the church court ended up supporting him on the corruption charges and, later, on adultery charges, he was brought up on election law violations by a federal grand jury in 1931. And while he was eventually not convicted of these charges, either, the years of revelations ruined his reputation and contributed to Prohibition’s repeal in 1933.

Rollin Kirby, and the widespread use of the sniveling, bigoted “Mr. Dry,” gets as much credit as anyone for helping the repeal effort. In the last cartoon featuring the character, the now-deceased Mr. Dry was mourned by a rumrunner, a bootlegger, a racketeer, and a speakeasy proprietor. “I was almost sorry to see him go,” said Kirby. “I was almost getting fond of the old bum.”

WWII: “Crusader” (ca. 1941-42)

“Crusader” (ca. 1941-42)
by John Francis Knott (1878 – 1963)
8 x 16 in., pencil on board
Coppola Collection

Knott started working at the Dallas News as an artist in 1905 and achieved national prominence for his World War I and Woodrow Wilson era cartoons.  He had a 50-year career with the Dallas News and created more than 50,000 cartoons. Texas newspapers widely acknowledged that Knott helped increase the sales of Liberty Bonds and donations to agencies involved in the war effort.

There is no date on this ironically titled cartoon, so I am making a guess. It could be as early as 1939, following the first invasion of Poland.

By mid-1941, the Nazis were moving into the Soviet Union from Europe (Operation Barbarossa, June 22, 1941). Here is an excerpt from some speeches given in late 1941 and early 1942 that specifically mention protecting Europe from Bolshevism:

But I think that if Providence has already disposed that I can do what must be done according to the inscrutable will of the Providence, then I can at least just ask Providence to entrust to me the burden of this war, to load it on me…. Thus the home-front need not be warned, and the prayer of this priest of the devil, the wish that Europe may be punished with Bolshevism, will not be fulfilled, but rather that the prayer may be fulfilled: “Lord God, give us the strength that we may retain our liberty for our children and our children’s children, not only for ourselves but also for the other peoples of Europe, for this is a war which we all wage, this time, not for our German people alone, it is a war for all of Europe and with it, in the long run, for all of mankind.”  — Berlin, 30 January 1942

Didn’t the world see, carried on right into the Middle Ages, the same old system of martyrs, tortures, faggots? Of old, it was in the name of Christianity. To-day, it’s in the name of Bolshevism. Yesterday, the instigator was Saul: the instigator to-day, Mardochai. Saul has changed into St. Paul, and Mardochai into Karl Marx. By exterminating this pest [Bolshevism], we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea. — Berlin21 October 1941

WWII: “Auf den letzten Mann” (October 1942)

“Eventually” (September 22, 1942)
by Paul Albert Plaschke (1880 – 1954)
24 x 36 in., ink and charcoal on paper
Coppola Collection

Going by the date printed on the back of this drawing, the editorial cartoon here is potentially quite poignant, from a historical perspective.

The British Commandos were formed in 1940 as a raiding force for Occupied Europe. By 1942, they were racking up successes, so the cartoon is probably an enthusiastic response to these. For instance, in March 1942, The St Nazaire Raid (Operation Chariot) was an amphibious attack on the heavily defended Normandie dry dock at St Nazaire, located at the mouth of the Loire estuary. Operation Chariot is known as The Greatest Raid of All. And in early September 1942, Operation Musketoon was a raid mounted against the German-held Glomfjord power plant in Norway.

The rest of the story here comes from some secret happenings on October 18, just a month after the date of this cartoon.

On August 19, during the Dieppe Raid, a Canadian brigadier, William Wallace Southam (against explicit orders), took a copy of the assault plan ashore. Although he tried to hide it, the Germans discovered the document on the beach. Among the orders was an instruction to ‘bind prisoners.’ The German Intelligence later received reports of the bodies of German prisoners. with their hands tied, washing ashore. When this news, and the written plans, were brought to Hitler, he ordered the shackling of Canadian prisoners, which led to a reciprocating order by British and Canadian authorities for German prisoners being held in Canada.

A few months later, in early October 1942, Operation Basalt was carried out on
the isle of Sark. During the raid, five prisoners were taken. The commandos tied the prisoners’ hands. One thing led to another, and four of the five prisoners ended up dead while trying to escape. Officially-sanctioned German accounts of the time assert unequivocally that the dead soldiers were found with their hands bound, and later German military publications make many references to captured Commando instructions ordering the tying of captives’ hands behind them, and the use of a particularly painful method of knotting around the thumbs to enable efficient, coercive, single-handed control of the captive.

The cartoon could also be representing the recent (i.e., July 1942) creation of a joint US-Canadian commando unit called “The 1st Special Service Force” who ended up being called “The Black Devils.” I think it is unlikely, given that it seems they were still in training, and not public, at the time of this cartoon (and the name “Black Devils” came from German journals). See the First Special Service Force entry in wikipedia for more.

Together, these two raids are believed to have motivated Hitler, two weeks later, on October 18, to issue the Commando Order (Kommandobefehl). The order, which was executed in only 12 copies and in secret, stipulated that any Allied commandos encountered by German forces in Europe and Africa should be killed immediately without trial, even if they attempted to surrender. The order also made it clear that failure to carry out these orders by any commander or officer would be considered to be an act of negligence punishable under German military law. Hitler invoked violations of the Geneva Conventions due to the alleged killing of bound German prisoners by the Allies.

The Commando Order, in part, read:

For a long time now our opponents have been employing in their conduct of the war, methods which contravene the International Convention of Geneva. The members of the so-called Commandos behave in a particularly brutal and underhanded manner; and it has been established that those units recruit criminals not only from their own country but even former convicts set free in enemy territories. From captured orders it emerges that they are instructed not only to tie up prisoners, but also to kill out-of-hand unarmed captives who they think might prove an encumbrance to them, or hinder them in successfully carrying out their aims. Orders have indeed been found in which the killing of prisoners has positively been demanded of them.

I order, therefore: From now on all men operating against German troops in so-called Commando raids in Europe or in Africa, are to be annihilated to the last man. This is to be carried out whether they be soldiers in uniform, or saboteurs, with or without arms; and whether fighting or seeking to escape; and it is equally immaterial whether they come into action from Ships and Aircraft, or whether they land by parachute. Even if these individuals on discovery make obvious their intention of giving themselves up as prisoners, no pardon is on any account to be given. On this matter a report is to be made on each case to Headquarters for the information of Higher Command.

The Commando Order was illegal, and recognized as such by the Nuremburg tribunal. The September 22, 1942 notion of a “Commando Order” to Hitler, as shown in this cartoon, is a macabre irony, given the events of October 18.