Giuseppe Eugenio Chiorino or GECH as he signed many of his works with an acronym of his full name, was born in 1871 about one hundred kilometers from Turin where he lived most of his life and died in 1941.
He is somehow a mysterious person with a wide range of interests spanning from drawing and caricature to working on radio and writing screenplays. His legacy definitely lies in his influence on younger artists who learned a lot from his specific eclectic style based on Art Nouveau. While it was initially taken from a French school, we can't deny the fusion of the elements from German Jugendstil and English Arts and Crafts and Pre-Raphaelites. Sometimes Chiorino's style is called Italian Art Nouveau with gentle, slender, and elongated female silhouettes and a lot of floral elements, mixed with some symbolism and often resembling the works of two of the most famous contemporaries: Eugene Grasset and Alphonse Mucha.
During his rich career, he made a great impact on the development of poster art and cover designs in Spain due to his collaboration with Blanco Y Negro magazine. While he studied philology and was fluent in Spanish language he never traveled to Spain. His illustrations were sent by post and the magazine promptly sent him back the magazines, almost 150 altogether, which he preserved to the end of his life.
Among many projects, he realized for Blanco Y Negro was a series of pictures portraying flowers characteristic for specific months, personified in his signature 'flower-ladies'. Women were his favorite drawing subject, and he is the author of the so-called donna liberta (Free Lady).
The series is titled Las Flores, and three illustrators (Jose Arija and Eulogio Varela were the other two) illustrated four months each. Every illustration was based on a poem about a specific month.
Here are all four months illustrated by GECH:
March
June
September
December
Aren't they great? Just perfect for making a December printable calendar!
