SAVING OUR HISTORY, ALFONSO IANNELLI S WORKED FOR FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT ORPHEUM THEATER ” BILLY B VAN AND THE BEAUMONT SISTERS” SIGNED POSTER. Alfonso Iannelli Orpheum Theatre Poster Silkscreen”Billy B Van and the Beaumont Sisters’. V large at 41.5 x 31.5 inches. Surface (matte black areas) show some rubbing. Backs are lightly soiled with old pricing in ink on corners. One of six Orpheum Theater posters produced, with the Iannelli estate’s permission, by the young Chicago Architecture Foundation in 1968 as a limited-edition fund raiser. Super high quality edition, hand-pulled silkscreen. From Chicago Center for the Print, originally written by Alan Artner. At the age of 12, and approximately 5 years later won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. Adept at both painting and sculpture, he started his career in commercial graphic design, opening his own studio where, by 1907, he was contributing drawings to Harper’s and The Ladies Home Journal. In 1910, he went to Los Angeles, and opened a design studio. Iannelli couldn’t have known at the time, at the age of 24, that his new job designing the lobby window for Los Angeles’ new Orpheum Vaudeville Theater could lead to his breakthrough into Modernism. Iannelli’s Orpheum posters gave vaudeville audiences a tangible advertisement for a new Modernism just flowering in avant-garde circles. The vibrant, geometrized figures he painted to represent the usual dog acts, comedians, dancers and singers on the circuit lines the theater’s lobby with abstractions never before seen by Los Angeles theatergoers. Iannelli’s posters caught the attention of Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1914 Iannelli accepted an invitation to come to Chicago to work with Wright on Midway Gardens, at 60th and Cottage Grove.
