EXTRACTS: illustrators issue 2 © 2012 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition))

82 TAKING THE ROUGH WITH THE SMOOTH David Roach Considers The Urbane Art of Renato Fratini H IDDEN ON THE RIGHT hand side of the poster for the classic Bond movie From Russia With Love , artlessly printed in the most basic of type faces, is the name Renato Fratini, ensuring him of the barest of obscure immortality. Fratini was more than just a jobbing movie poster artist; he was in fact the pre-eminent poster artist of the 1960s. Fellow film poster artist Vic Fair once described him as “incredible, he was like a machine—he could just bash things out overnight”. Colin Holloway, the art director who commissioned Fratini to paint the James Bond film posters commented that “he had amazing graphic sense and colour sense, like no one else I’ve ever known.” For the uninitiated, pinning Fratini’s style down can be a difficult thing, as he had the ability to transform his technique completely to suit the nature of the commission. But not content with posters, he was also a leading light of the paperback cover market, a noted magazine illustrator, and occasional comic book artist. He had a charismatic presence, and was very much the centre of the Italian ex-pat artistic community in London, and several British artists such as Barry Glynn who was his first assistant, and later Paul Harbutt worked in his Kensington Studio. In a golden age of Illustration, Fratini’s star shone very brightly. Renato Fratini was born just outside of Rome in 1932, and studied there at the Accademia Di Belle Arti. Turning professional in the early 1950s he joined the studio of the Guerri brothers, where he worked on illustrations and comic strips, but even then he knew he was capable of greater things. As Colin Holloway recounted in Sim Branaghan’s indispensable book British Film Posters: An Illustrated History , the young artist entered the Favalli brother’s studio, then Italy’s leading producer of film posters in 1952. Favalli’s stable of artists such as Nicola Simbari, Enrico DeSeta and Giorgio De Gaspari had established a bravura house style which paired frenetic, hyper realistic montages with startlingly bright and expressive colours. In his six years at the studio, Fratini created memorable images for such movies ABOVE: Cover art for ‘Whitaker’s Wife’, Fontana paperback.