[ART DECO] Vanity Fair. November, 1932 : the ""Hitler"" issue.

New York : Condé Nast Publications, Inc., November 1932. Large quarto format (325 x 250 mm), original pictorial wrappers, the front cover design a lampoon of Adolf Hitler by Italian artist Paolo Garretto; 72 pp, illustrated in colour and black-and-white; the wrappers have some very light handling wear, and the paper spine is chipped in a few places; contents clean and sound. Like the front cover of Vanity Fair's October 1932 issue, which featured a grotesque caricature of the fascist dictator Mussolini by Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, the cover of its November 1932 issue has achieved notoriety for Italian artist Paolo Garretto's anti-Nazi depiction of Adolf Hitler. At the time, Hitler was not yet in power: he would not become Chancellor of the Reichstag until January, 1933. 'When the editors of Vanity Fair sat down to plan the layout for their November 1932 cover, they probably had only one thing on their minds: How can we top our Mussolini cover? Perhaps the October issue of that year sold like hotcakes; maybe Mussolini was the Jennifer Aniston of his day. Whatever the case, Frank Crowninshield and his cadre of magazine minds decided Hitler was the perfect follow-up to Il Duce, and Vanity Fair’s fascist two-punch will forever go down as one of the most bewildering back-to-back cover choices in this magazine’s history.' (Vanity Fair) Italian Artist Paolo Garretto (1903-1989) was a prolific commercial artist specialising in caricatures for magazines and poster design, in a career that stretched from the late 1920s in Italy to the early post-war period. He worked in Paris, Berlin and London before being invited in October 1930 by editor Clare Boothe Brokaw to become a regular contributor to Vanity Fair. Like Covarrubias, in the 1930s Garretto produced many memorable covers lampooning prominent personalities of the day, for not only Vanity Fair, but also The New Yorker, Fortune and House & Garden. During World War II, Garretto was treated by the United States government as an enemy alien and was deported to Italy, where his anti-fascist and anti-war views - not to mention his Vanity Fair caricature of Hitler - meant that he was very much out of favour with the authorities. He refused to produce caricatures of Roosevelt and other Allied leaders for Fascist propaganda posters and was interned as a political prisoner in Hungary from 1942 until the end of the war.