Vittorio Fiorucci, Quebec graphic artist, 75

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Quebec graphic artist Vittorio Fiorucci dies

Alan Hustak
The Gazette

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Vittorio Fiorucci, one of the country's most acclaimed graphic artists best
known for the chuckling satyr that's become the mascot of the Just for
Laughs Comedy festival, died yesterday in Montreal. He was 75.

Fiorucci was a boulevardier, raconteur, and a gregarious self-confessed
hedonist who owned seven vintage cars as well as an outstanding collection
of antique mechanical toys.

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

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.

Fiorucci was born in Zara, Yugoslavia, to Italian parents on Nov. 2, 1932,
and grew up in Venice. He came to Canada when he was 19.

"I thought I was going to be a short-story writer," he once said. "But when
I came to Montreal I couldn't speak English, I couldn't speak French, I
couldn't rely on language so I used cartoons without words to express
myself. It just happened. I started doodling, and I started doing posters.
It was an accident."

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.

He often said he fulfilled his ambition to write short stories, but not as
he had planned. "Posters, are after all, short novels of art."

The little green man that became the symbol of the Montreal International
Comedy Festival was, he said, autobiographical, a self-caricature that
evolved over 40 years.

Despite his international reputation, he was not well known in English
Canada. He is mentioned in the French Encyclopedia Universalis and Who's Who
in Graphic Art, but not in the Canadian Encyclopedia.

"When I do a job in English they are always worried I am going to slip some
subliminal obscene thing into the design," he once told The Gazette, "The
French don't care."

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008