Bruno Munari

Bruno Munari was born in Milan in 1907 and spent his childhood in Badia Polesine (RO), near the Adige, where his parents run a hotel. With the age of majority he settled in Milan, where he soon joined Futurism and exhibited in important group exhibitions (Pesaro Gallery, Venice Biennale, Rome Quadriennale, Milan Triennale). In 1930 he created the Aerial Sculpture, which was followed by the important series of suspended sculptures Useless Machines (from 1933 onwards). From 1930 until 1937 he was associated with Ricas (Riccardo Castagnetti) in the graphic studio R + M. In this period he worked for magazines ("La Lettura", "Natura", "Settebello", "Grandi Firme"), books (The poem of the milk dress by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) and advertising (Campari). In 1942 he published the humorous book Munari's machines (Einaudi). From 1939 to 1945 he worked as a graphic designer for Mondadori and was the art director of the magazine “Tempo”. In 1945, again with Mondadori, he began a long and successful series of children's books, stimulated by the birth, in 1940, of his son Alberto. In 1947 he created Concave-convex, a new suspended sculpture. In 1948 he was one of the founders of the MAC (Movimento Arte Concreta), together with Gillo Dorfles, Gianni Monnet and Atanasio Soldati. From 1949 he publishes Illegible Books. In 1951 he presented the first Direct Projections, slides of slides in which fragments of various materials enlarged by the projection are inserted. Since 1952 he has been working in the field of industrial design designing foam rubber toys (Gatto Meo and Scimmietta Zizì, Pirelli), the cubic ashtray (Danese, 1957), the Falkland knitted lamps (Danese, 1964). A mass-produced object with a pure aesthetic function is Ora X (Danese, 1963 on a prototype of 1945). In 1962 he organized the traveling group exhibition Arte programmedata, supported by Olivetti, with a critical text by Umberto Eco (Milan, Venice, Rome). In the early 1960s he designed the graphic design of the Einaudi editorial series. In the same period, at the Studio of Monte Olimpino (CO), he collaborated with Marcello Piccardo in the making of experimental films, including Tempo nel tempo (1964). In 1970-1971 he designed the Robots structure. In 1974-1975 he returned to oil on canvas with the Curve series by Peano, based on a theory formulated in 1890 by the mathematician Giovanni Peano. In 1975 he designed the graphic symbol of the Lombardy Region. In the seventies, childhood was increasingly at the center of his interests, which led him to design numerous educational workshops. The first of these was made in 1977 for the Brera Art Gallery. In the eighties he continued to experiment with the most varied materials, for example in the Filipesi series (from 1981). His main essays are: Art as a profession (Laterza, 1966), Design and visual communication (Laterza, 1968), Artist and designer (Laterza, 1971), Codex obvious (Einaudi, 1971), Fantasy (Laterza, 1977), From what is born thing (Laterza, 1981). In 1995 he received the "Compasso d’ oro "award for his career, after the numerous assigned to specific projects (starting from that of 1954 for the Zizì Monkey). He died in Milan in 1998.