Leonetto CAPPIELLO (1875-1942) Terro (shoe cream), 1924 Mixed media. Wrapped in canvas. Signed center right. (Misses. Tears and stains at foot. Creases). 158.5 x 120 cm In the 1910s, Paul Poiret liberated women from the corset. After the war, she had her hair cut and her dresses came up to her knees. Cappiello and his colleagues had to reinvent a feminine character. Jacques Vienot describes her in his biography: "the healthy girl, plump, more natural, still laughing but more human, more powerful, more popular". In 1922, he designed a poster for Raoul shoes very similar to ours, but which does not appear to have been published (Rennert, p. 227, no. 355). In a way, it's Madame Everyman he's staging, without dramatizing her! It's a far cry from the slender women popularized by Jean-Gabriel Domergue in the '30s, or the American pin-ups and anorexic models with whom advertising would play at creating an ideal woman - or at least an idealized one. In the 20s, Cappiello chose to present women as they were.