Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

Mappin tells the history of graphic design in São Paulo from 1913 to 1939
ject of the local press. Newspaper ads invited people from São
Paulo to see the displays in the award-winning shop windows,
which were the talk of town. And to make sure everything was
good quality, there was a specially hired professional: an English
set designer and fashion designer who had worked for London’s
Harrods.
Mappin was part of the every-day life of the city and its sales
were true happenings. The Brazilian writer Zélia Gattai describes
these events in her memoirs like this:
Just once did I see my mother lose her temper: it was in Mappin’s
great sale, after the huge fire that almost destroyed São Paulo’s
largest, most renowned and most elegant department store,
when Mrs. Angelina went on a shopping spree, buying pretty
things for a bargain, true bargains. She spent up all of the house’s
savings, money that had been being set aside for emergencies
and was kept behind a huge picture – an anarchist allegory – that
decorated the dining room (GATTAI, 1983: 86).
Until 1939, when Mappin crossed the viaduct and opened its
doors at Ramos de Azevedo Square, there was an extensive production
of ads and prints. Every day, they ran newsletters or ads
showing their products and, periodically, catalogues of the sales
and new collections, invitations, and programs.
3. An overview of graphic production in the
early 20th century, in São Paulo
The first decades of the 1900’s years in Brazil, and in São Paulo particularly,
were marked by the decline of coffee, which, combined
with the difficulty to import because of World War I, gave momentum
to the process of industrialization. At that same time, the many migratory
waves brought in professionals, who, with their experience,
contributed to the development of the field of graphic design and the
arts too. They opened, for example, Max Schappe & Cia in Joinville
which, in 1905, imported the first lithographic machine. In 1901,
in São Paulo, the company Empresa Lythographica Hartmann-Reichenbach
was founded, later called Companhia Lytographica Ypiranga
which, in 1913, had 13 large printers, 60 accessory machines
and 120 workers (CAMARGO, 2003: 42) (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Detail of the proof section of Sociedade Técnica Bremensis, in São Paulo
(In: PAULA & CARRAMILO NETO, 1989: 61)
The color images could have up to 12 colors and followed the personal
taste of the master lithographer who defined the number
of colors according to the need or intensity he wanted to reach in
the work. The preparation of stones, sorting, transportation, and
other operations took from one to six months. The most difficult
part was to work with colors, because there was no chromatic
scale and inks were opaque, with full coverage. A blue mixed with
yellow would not result in green, because the second color would
cover the first.
On the other hand, newspaper companies had mechanical typesetting
for the printing of texts; had imported the letter-setting
and line-setting machines Monotype and Lynotype; housed
book-printing sections and other sections for the manufacturing
of image stereotypes. In São Paulo, newspapers like O Estado de
S. Paulo, Correio Paulistano and Diário Popular printed portraits,
allegories, illustrated ads and cliché-ads, in their own zincographic
print shops.
There were also illustrated magazines featuring opinions, humor,
charges, covers, and color illustrations. In March 1906, O Malho
printed 40,000 copies, as many as the leading newspaper of the
time (RAMOS, 1986: 20).
The technical advances were reason for pride. The magazine Revista
da Semana, for example, was the first to print trichromatic
clichés in South America. It was also the first to use photography
as illustration, serving as a standard to all others.
Headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Pimenta de Melo & Cia was the
leading Brazilian publisher of magazines then. In 1926, it published
the first Brazilian magazine in offset, Cinearte. In 1924,
it had two flat lithography printers, one offset, and fifteen typographic
printers, one of them with five colors. In addition, it had
fourteen linotypes, one monotype, and eight copying cameras
(CAMARGO, 2003: 50).
Cliché, lithography, and halftone photography, along with typography,
were the support for Mappin’s catalogues and ads,
sometimes using all resources in the same piece, other times
using one to get to the reality of the other. According to Cardoso
(2009: 140), when one talks about photography of the time,
“Gravure sought to simulate the alleged photographic realism
and, sometimes, photography got the treatment of illustration”.
Visual quality ranged from the cosmopolitan and rich art nouveau
language, on the covers of catalogues, to the simple and
small drawn ad with side-by-side image and text.
4. Mappin’s ads in newspapers and
magazines
These were Mappin’s prints at the time: European influence for
the local public. These prints reproduced drawings copying photos
and halftone photos printed with flat colors: on the outside
sophistication and art nouveau style; on the inside direct and
simple language.
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies 481