Armano Seguso Biography
He immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of four and received his early education in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.  A talent for the violin launched him into a career as a musician and after earning fame at the age seventeen for a waltz composition Dream of Mother, Seguso came to New York four years later to study painting at the National Academy of Design, which he financed by playing violin in a cabaret - a job which ended when he barely escaped a bullet in a fracas.  He switched to less lucrative, somewhat safer jobs, playing in vaudeville and movie pit orchestras.

Seguso later took a position at a commercial art studio. His oil and brushwork technique, as featured on his poster for Buster Keaton's 1928 film Steamboat Bill, Jr., drew the attention of MGM's art director. He then worked primarily for MGM, illustrating with crayon, pastel, and watercolor. Some of his assignments included posters for Gone with the Wind (1939), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Random Harvest (1942), The Human Comedy (1943), Kismet (1944), Mrs. Parkington (1944), and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944). For Paramount, Seguso designed posters for The Cat and the Canary (1939) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943).

His brilliant color and broad, vigorous technique also enlivened magazine covers including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Woman's Home Companion.

Poster art, illustration, female figure, musician.