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Gino Boccasile was an Italian artist from the 1920s to the 1950s. He was born in Italy in 1901, and he worked in Milan at an art agency beginning in 1925. He later traveled to France and Argentina, following his teacher, Achille Mauzan. In the 1930s, he returned to Italy, leaving Mauzan behind, and he worked for Pitigrilli, and did posters, art prints, and magazine illustrations. When Mussolini took power in Italy in the late 1930s, Boccasile began creating wild and shocking posters for Benito Mussolini's fascist government, and in the 1940s, he enlisted in the Italian SS Division and produced recruitment and propaganda posters for the Italian army. Some examples of his most outrageous posters include a racist caricature of an African American soldier writing $2 on the Venus di Milo, and a bloody toddler standing over the body of a friend while a U.S. bomber flies overhead and a city burns in the background. Many of his war posters were printed by the "Propaganda Abteilung J" (Propaganda Department J) of the Wehrmacht, which operated in Verona, Italy, and most had no title or signature on them (in most cases, the illustration itself needed no titling!). After the war, Boccasile was imprisoned and tried for collaborating with the fascists. Though acquitted, he remained an outcast and could not find work for several years as the notoriety from his earlier work was feared by prospective employers, and he died in 1952, and he was only 51 years of age. But in spite of the controversial nature of the subject matter of many of his works, many consider him the most important Italian poster artist from 1930 to 1950.

Artist: Gino Boccasile

Important Added Info: Note that we auctioned this remarkable poster in 2017, and the person who purchased it then has reconsigned it to us, so it is still the only example of this poster we have ever auctioned. It is likely that this poster can only be found in museum collections, and this is surely a very rare opportunity to obtain this poster.

Note that this poster is one of Gino Boccasile's most powerful propaganda war posters. As mentioned above, it shows a bloody toddler standing over the body of a friend while a U.S. bomber flies overhead and a city burns in the background. Note that there are fountain pens laying on the ground by the toddlers. The poster was inspired by reports (perhaps an urban legend) that U.S. planes were dropping hundreds of explosive fountain pens (pens that exploded when their tops were taken off), so that civilians and children would find them on the ground and then be killed when they opened them! We tried to research this story, and it is unclear whether there is any basis of fact in it, but this type of warfare (dropping exploding pens, lighters, toys, ect) had been attributed to the U.S., German and Soviet forces, and the story has been repeated in other armed conflicts such as Afghanistan in the 1980s and Iraq in the early 2000s. What is likely is that those who viewed this poster surely accepted that it was fact, and therefore the poster was very effective in creating hostility against the Allied forces! Note that very few of Boccasile's posters from the 1930s and 1940s survive, no doubt in part because of the great paper shortages at that time, and also because of the subject matter. The few times posters like these are offered for sale, the asking price is in the thousands of dollars!

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