Graphic autobiography: portrait of Italo Lupi

Italo Lupi's book, published in Italy by Corraini, is an autobiography of a designer, an atlas of carefully-chosen images and pictorial manual for future generations of creatives.

Italo Lupi, Autobiografia grafica, Corraini edizioni 2013

D'abord que je vous dise qu'on ne risque rien à livrer le secret professionnel puisque on ne livre pas le moyen de s'en servir.
Jean Cocteau

On opening In Search of Lost Time, near the beginning of the first book one stumbles across a long description of the church at Combray. It is meticulous account, the purpose of which is to reveal to the reader the detail of a building that is all too often recognised only for its iconic nature. It is a provincial design, a minor example, but it is also a landmark for the inhabitants of the village who see it exclusively in terms of its function - liturgic and symbolic - rather than the complex relationship of its parts - body and tower - reducing its delicate design to a sketchy approximation of the overall. To remedy this error of blindness, Proust uses a method that reveals, through the unveiling of objects and places, the progressive and articulated design of an interior biography, emotive and analytical, the true protagonist of the novel. One cannot think of reading into the depths of one’s soul, the description of the church seems to tell us, if one cannot decipher the details on the surface of the world.

An identical principle seems to guide the latest sophisticated publishing project by Italo Lupi, an autobiography, both scientific and sentimental that moves through the years to weave a story made up of places and relationships, people and anecdotes, names and circumstances. It is however a graphic autobiography, an indispensable instrument of knowledge for all those who, for example, consider of a book only the meaning of the written words, or of a magazine, exclusively the significance of the articles published and, of an exhibition, only the intrinsic value of the works on display. This book has the great merit of making known and understood, even to a less attentive reader, the wonderful complexity of a book design, an exhibition, a poster or a cover as well as a street sign, placing in a close, necessary relationship the form and content of each individual artefact. The graphic autobiography is, in this sense, similar to the long description of the church of Combray: a delight for the imagination and a way of understanding the meaning of things.

As with any self-respecting autobiography, the precision of the index acts as the counterpart to the freedom with which it can be read: in chronological order, by specific arguments, via overall areas of interest, every approach is legitimate and legitimised by the attention to detail, the true hallmark of every great graphic designer. A word about the title however. Autobiografica grafica might almost seem to be a reductive synthesis for a designer who has explored all aspects of the creative world, yet entering into the finer aspects of the book it can be understood with more rigour and reason. Graphics is the way with which Lupi stitches together the infinite fragments of a long and rich career and offers it as an instrument of knowledge and synthesis also to those who think they may find in this book some hints as to the secrets of a complex trade, that you don’t learn at school but that is constructed through the many, variegated experiences of an entire life.

This much the author explains with a selection of entertaining recollections, in the first part given over to the years of education, enriched with pages of comic-strips – a touching one by Crepax features Lupi himself together with his wife – magazine covers and early graphic designs. Here names of people, friends and indirect teachers emerge but what appears above all is evidence of the passion that drives a generous curiosity rewarded in the projects of later years. These are separated into a series of general areas – publishing, exhibitions, urban design, covers, small works of architecture, advertising – that are then broken down into smaller fragments, still very significant, made up of reminiscences and selected articles, tributes to great designers and places linked to professional and sentimental experiences – Turin, Tokyo, Milan, London – names of leading magazines and exceptional events – a prime example being the 1968 Triennale – occasional collaborators and long-standing friends. It is difficult to identify a focal point in a book that by vocation glides across the surface of the history of the second half of the twentieth century with the assuredness of one who has experienced the events first-hand, one who has written, using the tools of his own trade, a number of important pages in the “Italian novel”.

Perhaps, based on the evidence of a possible lowest common denominator being high-quality Made in Italy, one could find a point of origin in the description on page 49, alongside the poster for the reopening of the San Siro stadium, whose amusing little icons, derived from the image of an old board game – a wink at Subbuteo and all the pop culture of the 1960s – return on the black cover of the book, inviolable seals of some of the designer's rules. More than rules here one should speak of a genuine professional secret, copiously bestowed on every single page of the book and dedicated, this yes, only to those who are able to read between the lines of the official account. By looking at the images, faces, posters and displays – almost without needing the words that accompany them – it is possible to trace the accurate rules of the graphic game that Lupi plays for us.

The author in fact declares a natural interdependence between his own works, reservoirs of colour and typographic solutions, and those, very numerous and significant, that form his almost infinite visual archive – from Vignelli to Ponti – the real workings of the trade for graphic designers. It is in fact via the permanent frequentation of an extremely rich universe, made up of memories and relationships of images – many of which have been reproduced in the book – that the designer constructs his personal and distinctive graphic style, a playful, ironic world (but never sarcastic), made of two dimensional montages able to acquire the relevance of a precious fabric, rich in subtle references and continually renewed by an imagination made tangible through the work. A particularly good example could be the posters that Domus magazine commissioned for the Milan Furniture Fair in 1988 that Lupi interpreted via a series of masked portraits, a discreet reference to the magnificent prints of Ennemond Petito, with the help of Steven Guarnaccia, one of his longstanding collaborators. The masters of Modernism are seen in a playful and culturally of-its-time postmodern interpretation, not merely stylistic but conceptual.

A separate article could be written about the numerous exhibitions, each conceived with the same care given to the publishing projects and recognisable for the rich variety of signs and formal solutions that makes Lupi’s work so special. Significant, in these terms, are the photographs of an exhibition designed with Guido Canali at Parma in 1979, one of the many exceptional journeys that declares, in the book, the extent to which collaboration with other professionals, in Lupi's experience serves to oxygenate design. The author draws strength from this teamwork that, by all accounts, resembles more a personal partnership and gives rise to interesting anecdotes even on the pages where the projects are simply described. A dense and inextricable map, perhaps legible only by parts as was that famous publication in 2003 with studio FM in Abitare, dedicated to the history of Italian design. If, ten years on from that sophisticated example of graphic deign, one wanted to publish a second, updated to 2013, a prominent place would certainly be reserved for Lupi himself.

Graphic autobiography: portrait of Italo Lupi

Italo Lupi's book, published in Italy by Corraini, is an autobiography of a designer, an atlas of carefully-chosen images and pictorial manual for future generations of creatives.

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