Renato Casaro: Master of Movie Posters

Renato Casaro began his movie poster career in 1953 at the age of 18 when he landed a job as an in-house artist for Studio Favalli, a major design firm for the Italian film industry. He would go on to become one of the country’s most prolific movie poster designers, creating dramatic compositions for Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, and other icons of the medium.

His output feels limitless, finding success not only within his native Italy, but throughout the world. He created posters for German, Japanese, British, and American markets long before other artists were making that international jump.

Recently, Quentin Tarantino hired Casaro to create faux movie poster props as the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, turning Leonardo DiCaprio into a vintage movie poster Western hero.

While our galleries are being reinstalled during the first half of of October, Poster House is thrilled to share three of Casaro’s original vintage posters from the 1960s and 70s – Solaris, Il Serpente di Fuoco, and i Colorados – all on loan from the Chisholm-Larsson Gallery in Chelsea.

Solaris is a 1972 Soviet film based on the identically-named 1961 novel. It focuses on the slow psychological breakdown of a small space crew orbiting the fictional planet Solaris. It would be remade in 2002 by the American director Steven Soderbergh.

I Colorados is actually made up of various episodes of the American television show Stories of the Century. The vignettes were spliced together to create a Western-themed film for Italian audiences.

Il Serpente di Fuoco – literally translating to “The Serpent of Fire” – is the Italian release of the Peter Fonda-led film The Trip, a psychedelic movie about LSD written by Jack Nicholson.

Stop by our storefront before October 17 to see these beauties in the real before they’re gone!

Lead image: Solaris (1972)