The pharmaceutical company Takeda Italia became the first Italian company to use art as a means of promoting health maintenance when it recently began a revolutionary ad campaign called “The Art of Health and the Health of Art.”
140,000 posters hanging across Rome and Milan pair messages about leading a healthy life with paintings by abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko. Why Rothko? The company chose to enhance their message with his color block paintings because his work provides “simple expressions of complex ideas” – an approach to health that Takeda promotes.
In addition to Rothko paintings, each poster features a quote that encourages healthy practices. One cites the Greek physician Hippocrates: “Walking is man’s best medicine.” Another quotes the 17th century writer La Rochefoucauld: “To eat is a necessity. To eat intelligently is an art.”
The poster below gives its readers some witty encouragement to stop smoking. It reads “Stop Smoking. Begin to Breathe Again” and features a quip from Oscar Wilde: “It’s easy to stop smoking: I stop ten times a day.”
Doing double duty, the poster also serves to advertise an upcoming Rothko exhibition due to open in Rome’s (almost) restored Palazzo delle Esposizione from 4 October 2007 to 6 January 2008.
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