On August 28, the first of 25 volumes dedicated to the artist, designer, revolutionary theorist, educator, who crossed the twentieth century dismantling its rhetoric piece by piece
There is no figure in Europe like Bruno Munari (1907-1998) who, from the 1930s onwards, has always proposed, for three generations, new models, new ideas, expanding research from art to design to planning. Munari also elaborated refined theoretical research on the theme of creation and at the same time redesigned the image of a large part of Italian publishing, a brilliant graphic, proposing then, since the first post-war period, a revolutionary project of education in the image of children. The training, the times, the meetings? Let’s start with a passage that Munari puts at the beginning of Art as a profession (1966): Many people know me for “that of useless machines” … which I conceived and built around 1933. At that time the “Italian twentieth century” reigned … and with my useless machines I really made people laugh; all the more so as these objects were constructed with outlines of flat-colored painted cardboard and sometimes a blown glass ball; all held together by very fragile wooden sticks and silk threads. The whole had to be very light to be able to turn with the air and the silk thread was fine to disperse the twist. Silk threads, cards, sheets, clippings linked to geometric abstraction: a silent protest against the rhetoric of the twentieth century.
Where does this very different research by Bruno Munari come from? And where do your paintings of these Thirties come from, suspended figures, rigorous geometries, hints of shapes in motion that evoke futurism, perhaps that of Fortunato Depero? Munari’s novelty lies in the sign, a subtle, transparent, vibrant sign that traverses the entire creation of the artist even after the war and that is connected to an idea of space as a place where it trembles, a contour, a color, a trace vibrates. ; the sign of Paul Klee at Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau with whose research, and with that of Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Munari is connected. For him, the Russian Vassilij Kandinskij geometrizes and makes abstract an image of the natural and therefore his creation does not seem stimulating to him. Since the second post-war period, research, for Munari, becomes an opposition of models as I will explain later in artist and designer (1971): The designer is a designer with an aesthetic sense, who works for the community. The designer does not perform his work by hand except for the model and the “handmade” does not make sense in the designer’s work … while the artist, if he has to design an object of use, does it in his own style, the designer has no some style and the final shape of his objects the logical result of a design.
Munari was educated in the Crocian philosophy, dominant in advanced circles and in the debate on art in the Thirties, but in the dialogue with the Bauhaus he discovers complex planning, the confrontation with the real of the designer, of the architect, and abandons the mythologies of the creator outside the world. Munari very clear: The artist’s dream, however, is to get to the museum, while the designer’s dream is to get to the local markets. On this basis, Munari’s creation becomes decisive in many directions: some volumes with tin covers and illustrations by Munari himself date from the 1930s as The lyrical watermelon, with texts by Tullio d’Albisola and presentation by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1934); also significant 4 covers for La Lettura (1937-1939) subtly linked to Surrealism. The necklace is still important Munari’s machines e Abecedario of Munari, for Einaudi (1942). There are many inventions of entire necklaces and it is enough to mention one that is decisive for our history, the New Polytechnic (1965) with a red square on a white background, an obvious homage to Kazimir Malevic.
In the years between the postwar period and the 1960s, Munari’s experience it becomes complex and the mythologies of idealism are replaced by the Gestalt theory, the theory of perception that he had already intuited in the Bauhaus teaching of the 1930s. Now Munari’s whole theoretical discourse changes, designing objects a rational path, art is not felt, it is explained, and this new awareness becomes the creation of objects that make the history of our design in the world, from Ashtray (1957) a Travel sculptures (1958) a Flexy (1968), ad Cockpit (1971) where new ways of thinking about space are compared as a place for play but also as a revelation. The dialogue aimed at childhood always accompanies Munari’s research, so in the series of Illegible books, from the fifties to the sixties, the book is the tool to discover new subjects, to evaluate their texture, to measure the gaze on the geometries of the sheets and their relationships. In all these books created to educate children before they begin to write, the evocation of wrinkled materials, thread-like signs, thoughtful creations by Paul Klee at the Bauhaus returns.
We start from the world of signs
A new series for children dedicated to the great artist and designer Bruno Munari (Milan, 24 October 1907 – 30 September 1998). The volume will be on newsstands from Saturday 28 August Signs, the first issue of Fare to grow – Munari Method Laboratories, a series of 25 issues on sale with Corriere della Sera and La Gazzetta dello Sport in e 8.90 in addition to the cost of the two newspapers. The series, curated by the didactic expert Silvana Sperati, created in collaboration with the Bruno Munari Association and offers unpublished and illustrated volumes that explore the pedagogical revolution and Munari’s innovative approach: in addition to being one of the great protagonists of art and graphics, the designer was also the inventor and author of educational games, workshops and books for children. The first issue will remain on newsstands for two weeks.
As he writes in the preface of Signs Alberto Munari, son of Bruno and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva, the active experimentation of materials, techniques, tools, free from any aesthetic preconception but rigorous and systematic in its progress, has always been my father’s favorite working method , convinced as he was that aesthetic concern should never be a starting point, but is instead a valence, a sort of “added value” that can emerge later, almost naturally, when the experimentation was conducted with due care care, consistency and attention. Among the upcoming releases of the series, all on a weekly basis: Color (September 4); Games (Sept. 11); Parole (September 18); Books (September 25); geometry (2nd October).
August 27, 2021 (change August 27, 2021 | 21:14)
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