Robert, Alfonso and Vincent Iannelli, circa 1903.

Plaster of “Spring,” circa 1908.

Lobby vitrines for Orpheum Theater, 1912.

Workingman’s hotel study, 1912.

“Fountaingirl,” 1913.

Pencil sketches for Orpheum posters, circa 1914.

“Octagon” indoor sculpture for Midway Gardens, 1914.

“Sprite” outdoor sculpture for Midway Gardens, 1914.

Midway Gardens “Sprite” drawing, March 28, 1914.

Milo cigarettes study, 1914-15.

“Cactus Kate” for Packard, 1915.

Brochure for California Courier Tours, 1915.

Marshall Field Men’s store ad study, 1915.

Park Ridge Iannelli Studios fence, circa 1920.

Poster for Silver Screen Ball, 1938.

Antonia, Robert, Alfonso and Vincent, circa 1890s.

Pencil sketch for Sioux City frieze, 1916.

From the time of his birth on February 17, 1888, Alfonso Iannelli had learned the artisan’s trade. Itinerant craftsmen journeyed into his hometown of Andretta from time to time to repair the local church, and young Alfonso absorbed as much as he could. The artists who surrounded him had to be well-rounded as stone or wood sculptors, carpenters, painters, and weavers – required to fix any and all parts of the church that needed work. Indeed, Iannelli remembered one of his teachers dressed as a Renaissance artist in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci.

In the 1890s, Alfonso’s father left for America to give his family a better life than the one they had in their impoverished Italian town. Ten-year-old Iannelli landed with his mother and brothers at Ellis Island shortly thereafter, named in the ship manifest as “Fannelli.” Americanizing his family surname of “Jannelli” into “Iannelli,” he began his professional career in 1906 at 125 Fifth Avenue in New York at just eighteen. The neighborhood is now called the “Flatiron District” and was the epicenter of Manhattan at the time.

Iannelli drawing, Cover of Harper’s Weekly, April 18, 1908.

Iannelli with clay bust, circa 1906.

Iannelli started his career there by designing magazine illustrations for Colliers, Harper’s Weekly, and other popular periodicals, but he was still studying at the Art Student’s League and working as an apprentice to Gutzon Borglum, America’s preeminent sculptor. Borglum was so taken with young Iannelli’s carving abilities, he let him assist in carving the angels for the Upper West Side’s giant St. John the Divine Cathedral commission.

It was also as a student at the Art Student’s League in 1908 that Iannelli created a sculpture of a sensuous nude writhing out of a rock that won him the new Saint-Gaudens Prize, named for the recently deceased Augustus Saint-Gaudens, considered America’s greatest sculptor. The plaster Spring resembled the later sculptures of Auguste Rodin and may also have been aimed at Borglum’s attention, who had studied in Paris and was known to be enamored of Rodin’s work.

IANNELLI STUDIOS

In 1910, after a short-lived marriage to one of his posing models in New York and a limited stay at a lithography company in Cincinnati, Iannelli moved to Los Angeles. He began Iannelli Studios there in 1912 in partnership with the stained-glass designer whose company made Iannelli’s lobby window for the Orpheum Vaudeville Theater.

Iannelli’s own twentieth century studio would emulate the Renaissance artisan’s model, and he would design advertisements and later appliances as if they were altarpieces or carvings of saints. Starting in 1912, Iannelli also taught in his own Bauhaus-like school of applied art or in other schools founded by institutions or independent teachers.

One of Iannelli’s first jobs in the new Iannelli Studios was the painting of vaudeville showcards for the lobby of the Orpheum. He bought Favr Rule toned paper cardboard from a local art supply store in its traditional dimensions of 30” x 40”. These cardboard pieces fit into the paired metal and glass display cases along the lobby walls without further trimming. Iannelli then cut a rectangular hole into each sheet, allowing for a window to show a publicity photo or the management’s schedule for that particular act. The placement of that cut-out was both graphically and strategically positioned for the design of each tempera poster.

First window frame of Orpheum Theater, 1912.

Third window frame of Orpheum Theater, 1912.

Iannelli distilled each of the vaudeville acts he was showcasing with these posters in a frozen scene that was often more abstracted than the act itself. He used the toned paper background with a few slashes of color to represent the performance. Also, the lettering for each was unique to the poster. Not only was it similar to the new European lettering styles, but it served as a graphic device for the poster itself, varying with each Vaudeville act to convey high-brow acting, a couple’s dancing, or a low-brow comedian’s mime of a drunkard.

But first and foremost, Iannelli was a sculptor. His new studio produced figurative fountains and small decorative statuettes to sell in the warm climate of Southern California. The time he spent on the West Coast was a productive and profitable time for Alfonso, but by February of 1914, he was summoned to frosty Chicago by Frank Lloyd Wright to sculpt the life-sized statues animating the roof-line of his outdoor concert garden.

MIDWAY GARDENS

Iannelli’s collaboration with Wright on the cubistic, concrete “Sprites” became a lesson on distilling the architecture into a symbol for the meaning of the building. The designs also may have been a response to the Los Angeles love affair he was having with one of his most gifted students, Margaret Spaulding. The love letters from Chicago suggest the “smile” on the Sprite’s face may have actually been inspired by Margaret’s own. At the very least, Margaret’s own drawings showed a similar smile that probably influenced him.

The cast from an original mold into concrete was also the forerunner of Alfonso’s repeatable designs for the steel appliances that consumed him as an industrial designer. This method merged artful design with multiplication that was also used by an artist of applied art.

Iannelli’s sculptural designs for later appliances in the 1930s showed an architectural character of a sort. But from Midway Gardens on, he saw his place in architecture as the direction for his future.

Saharet, October 1913.

“Sarah Bernhardt” Orpheum poster, March 1913.

ORPHEUM POSTERS

Upon returning to Los Angeles at the end of July 1914, the Orpheum posters assumed a more geometric, Wrightian look. The posters had been left in the capable hands of his new associate and romantic partner, Margaret. Because of her interest in modern European fashion, Margaret was more attuned to the continent’s advances in art and, combined with Iannelli’s Chicago adventure, the later posters became more advanced in their graphic look. The showcards became simpler and more architectonic in their design approach. Iannelli marks this phase as a “metamorphosis” in their development, but it’s also clear that working with Wright had influenced the Orpheum posters.

The Chicago experience had also introduced him to Prairie design and Wright’s brand of Modernism. Parallel to the European forms of Austria and Germany, the American Prairie version and Wright’s later Midway Gardens Constructivism seemed to point Iannelli in a new direction.

“Orpheum Beauties” Orpheum poster, circa 1914.

“Maria Lo & Co” Orpheum poster, April 1915.

Probably, one of the first industrial designs with regard to packaging may have been his vivid paint job for Packard Motor’s new automobile and its appearance at the San Diego 1915 Panama–California Exposition. Its radiator, doors, and wheel rims were designed in bold black-and-white checkerboard motifs, and its vibrant colors reflected the stage flats of the Ballets Russes, then performing in Paris and London. Iannelli was so pleased with the result that he took Frank Lloyd Wright to see it in a Fair preview when the architect visited California.

The sculptural work with Wright started out smoothly, and Alfonso’s resulting Sprite statues became a legendary part of the 1914 Chicago masterpiece. However, the two artists had a major falling-out when, in May of 1915, Iannelli saw in a contemporary magazine that Wright didn’t credit him with the Sprite’s cubistic design at all and later simply brushed off Iannelli’s fury in their exchanged letters about the slight.

CHICAGO

Despite the contretemps, architectural sculpture was then Iannelli’s primary objective, and, after marrying Margaret, he moved to Illinois to establish Iannelli Studios under the roof of a building in the Chicago Loop. The shared top floor rooms of Michigan Avenue’s Monroe Building were leased by architect Barry Byrne, a Los Angeles friend of both Iannelli, and Wright’s two eldest sons. Byrne had started his career by working as a draftsman to the great architect in the Oak Park studio. But it was Byrne and not Wright who partnered with Iannelli in design and decoration jobs for Byrne’s architectural clients.

During this time, Iannelli saw his brilliant wife, Margaret, illustrate modernist advertisements for the Marshall Field’s department store. That she displayed mental instability at home was the only chink in their otherwise successful careers. Little did he know that her mental health would steadily decline. By the end of 1918, both Margaret and Iannelli Studios’ Los Angeles founding partner, James F. Rudy, would no longer be around.

Alfonso and Margaret, circa 1915.

“The Field Wardrobe Trunk” advertisement, circa 1915.

COLLABORATION

Margaret took the lead in the illustration jobs for Marshall Field and Company. And, even though the Studios were still rooted in the collaborative process, her hand is unmistakable in the proofs of those advertisements. She also designed the dainty Bauer & Black baby talcum container and other packaging and posters for the company. Perfume bottles, fashion designs, and furniture schemes kept her pen busy, but she began to chafe at the other more prosaic studio clients.

Iannelli still painted the fireplace murals and designed sculpture for the buildings he and Byrne codesigned, and they also partnered in the look of the interiors and exteriors of some of them. Alfonso designed sculpture for various architects, primarily the major doorway reliefs for Purcell & Elmslie and their Woodbury County Courthouse in Sioux City, Iowa.

Since the top of the Monroe Building was growing cramped, the Iannelli Studios moved to 2209 West Wabansia, a former glove factory that had room for Iannelli to spread out, and he and Margaret began to raise their first son in a nearby apartment.

“The Modern Art Idea” school brochure, circa 1915.

Bauer & Black poster, circa 1920.

Iannelli Studios cofounding partner in Los Angeles, James Rudy, was hurriedly brought to Chicago to take over running the day-to-day business after Margaret was unable, through pregnancy, to perform that duty. But after he raced to the Midwest, he caught influenza and died of bronchial pneumonia on October 5, 1918.

By the end of 1919, Iannelli Studios had moved to Park Ridge, Illinois, into an old stable at 255–257 Northwest Highway. It was linked to a farmhouse where Alfonso and Margaret could raise their family and build on their growing Chicago clients for illustrations and sculptures. The Iannelli Studios, themselves, became a “salon” of thought and discussion.

Alfonso and Margaret lost their one-year-old second son on December 6, 1920, from what was reported to have been a congenital heart defect. While the cause of death was natural, town gossip blamed Margaret. From then on, her paranoia and grief pushed her over the edge of sanity.

Martin and Martin ad, circa 1920.

“Tomb to Louis Sullivan” Art Institute exhibition, 1925.

She left for New York City in January 1921 and worked on her own as a freelance graphic designer, using her maiden name, Margaret Spaulding. She may not have known she was pregnant again at the start of her sojourn, but she did soon after. She came back to Park Ridge in the summer and only sporadically did work for the Studios.

Margaret left the Studio after her third child was born in September of 1921. Her advertising work was soon taken over by Edgar Miller, but once he permanently left in 1926, illustrations in the Studio were rare, save for Iannelli’s own sketches. Margaret’s relocation to mental institutions and quiet farms over the years shifted her talents to occasional magazine covers, illustrations for children’s books, and the mental hospital’s mimeographed newsletters.

Iannelli had become famous enough in the early 1920s that Ben Hecht praised him as “Iannelli the Great, statue manufacturer of talent and individuality” in his Chicago Literary Times story about young Edgar Miller. Iannelli soon found, in 1921, a young night school student of his who would run the Studios and not only help raise the little Iannelli children, but design with the best of his employees. In the 1930s, he and Ruth Blackwell would cement her position there as the manager of all the Iannelli Studios collaborations.

DEMOCRACY

Iannelli’s interiors for churches and theaters and his sculptural work for Chicago’s new Adler Planetarium kept him busy throughout the 1920s. He found time, however, for his studio to be a magnetic place for intellectuals to gather.

Iannelli was wildly liberal, and his politics also informed his approach to his applied art. He felt applied art for commercial sale was more democratic than fine art that may sit on an elite wall of a rich man’s library or in a museum. It was ironic, then, that his “democratic” art found its way into a major museum’s galleries.

In December 1921, Iannelli was a part of a group exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to the large clay and plaster maquettes for his monumental courthouse figures, he showed several of his floor lamps, bookends, and paperweights. These were some of his earliest industrial designs and, seen in retrospect, were close cousins of his later kitchen appliances, humidifiers, and hair clippers designed for the manufacturers his studio worked with in the 1930s and 1940s. His appearance in the museum galleries and his attempt to start his own school earlier in the year probably caused the museum directors to invite Iannelli to teach sculpture at the School of the Art Institute for the 1923 fall season.

Bronze corner relief, Adler Planetarium, circa 1929.

“Sunbeam” appliance trademark, circa 1926.

In 1924, before his tour of Europe with old friend Barry Byrne, Iannelli became a naturalized citizen of the United States. And, like some transplants to the U.S., he became extremely patriotic, firing off letters to members of Congress and Presidents when he saw an unjust legal maneuver developing.

The Art Institute gave Alfonso Iannelli a major one-man exhibition in 1925, where his sketches, sculptures, stained-glass window designs, and architectural renderings were the objects on view and cemented his fame during the ’20s. The museum continued to show Iannelli’s work in subsequent exhibitions.

He had left his teaching position at the museum’s school in 1925, but by 1928, Iannelli was put in charge of a new school there that resembled Germany’s Bauhaus, where industrial design would be the focus.

Marshall Field ad, 1915.

Margaret Iannelli hat illustration, circa 1920.

Architectural drafting, color organization, lettering, interior decoration, textile design, ceramics, stage design, printmaking, life drawing, and art history were taught there in coursework that produced an array of modern designs, from radio cabinets to lamps and furniture for barber shops of the Jazz era. Since this was not what the museum expected for its famous school, the directors were alarmed that their school was teaching seemingly bohemian pursuits. Iannelli soon left.

IANNELLI’S INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

Chicago, from its centralized location and its preeminence in the growth of the mail-order catalogue business, was the leader in the marketing of goods for the American consumer. And it was Iannelli Studios that was called upon to modernize those products.

“Coronet” pen and pencil for Eversharp, circa 1936.

Publicity photo of Iannelli and trophy, circa 1931 (photo) and 2015 (graphic).

In 1926, Iannelli’s design for a new logo (then called a trademark) for the boxes for Sunbeam appliances of the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company may have started rolling the ball for appliance design in the Studio’s direction.

From 1931, Alfonso Iannelli and his Studios were designing, building, and supervising pavilions and exhibits for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Apart from the years-long work on that fair, they also spent the 1930s to the early 1950s designing Art Deco pens, cubistic faucets, doorless phone booths, streamlined coal burners, novel steel houses, and countertop kitchen appliances for a variety of American manufacturers.

For Alfonso Iannelli, those appliances became “democracy” coming to life. The marketing of Iannelli’s art spread to offices and kitchen counters with his particular design eye. When studying one’s distorted reflection from the surface of these appliances, the Iannelli Studios can be seen there when looking hard enough.