Antonio Boggeri (1900-1989), Italy's premier and greatest art director, always called on his designers to produce "Le spectacle dans la rue". He said it in French, deliberately quoting Cassandre, the leading affichiste of the first half of the twentieth century. In the late 1960s, Boggeri collected posters from all over the world. One hundred fifty of these, mainly of a cultural nature, lent substance to the historic exhibition staged by Renzo Zorzi and Giorgio Soavi for Olivetti in 1968 in Milan. From this body of work, Anna Boggeri and Bruno Monguzzi have selected and arranged 100 posters from ten countries (Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Japan, the UK, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the US and Switzerland) for the exhibition at Galleria Gottardo in Lugano. It is important to remember that the point of Boggeri's exhibition was to contrast posters from different sources which, unlike the decorative posters that proliferated in the 1960s, in the midst of the liberty revival linked to pop and rock music in particular, responded to a precise need: to carry a message in a well-defined period of time. These posters, exhibited in Milan in 1968 and in the Galleria Gottardo today, have become artefacts in the history of visual communication. To give some idea of the variety of the works and the artists who produced them, the following extract is taken from the piece written by Antonio Boggeri himself for the brochure of the original exhibition and republished in the catalogue that accompanies today's show.

"The oriental preciousness of the Japanese, modern interpreters of ancient symbology, fruitive of exquisite alphabets, is flanked by the variations on well-known abstract motifs of the American group from Chicago, Milton Glaser's typical designs, and Lou LoMonaco's dazzling black and white images; the vibrant colours of refined and incisively original British compositions; the modernity of the Dutch; the hugely inventive and fascinating designs of famous Polish and Czech artists, who for years have tirelessly continued the classic tradition while remaining atuned to the distant currents in the stimulating themes in theatre and exhibitions; the great, varied and unexpected contribution of the Swiss group, and finally the dramatic and expressive language, the mature artistry of the leading German figures Edelmann, Kieser and Hillmann".