Monna Vanna

Horace Brodzky was born in Melbourne in 1885 but left Australia at the age of 20 with his family for the United States, marking the beginning of an international career focused largely on drawing, printmaking and design that would play out between New York and London until his death in 1969.

Brodzky was involved in the avant-garde revival of printmaking in London in the first decades of the 20th century and is considered to be the first Australian to make a linocut print. In 1912 he met French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was instrumental in introducing modern art to England at that time. The two artists were exponents of vorticism, a style of abstraction inspired by the machine-propelled energy of modern life, evident in the flat planes and clean lines of this celebrated 1914 poster for Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Monna Vanna. Widely considered a classic of vorticist inspired design, it was reproduced in The Art of the Poster by E. McKnight Kauffer in 1925.