Munari polytechnic

The exhibition curated by Marco Sammicheli, with Giovanni Rubino, at the Museo del Novecento highlights the original artistic matrix of Munari’s work and testifies his role as a reference point for further generations of artists.

Munari was truly poly-technic and this much is highly evident in the exhibition currently showing at the Museo del Novecento: he was a designer, writer, theorist, sculptor, quasi-engineer, draughtsman and definitely a visionary.

In the preface to Arte Come Mestiere, he quotes Maxim Gorky, “an artist is one who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to discover a general objective meaning in them and express them in a convincing form”. So yes, Munari was absolutely an artist, a man that anyone who was lucky enough to be personally acquainted with could not forget and anyone who has only studied, cannot avoid.

View of the exhibition “Munari politecnico” at the Museo del Novecento, Milan

Bruno Munari was able to combine the industrial and artisan practice of the 1900s, associate, in a unique and unrepeatable way, words and object, concreteness and abstraction, solidity and irony. He was in reality a master of self-irony: he was able to capture and was equally keen to describe, the ferment and the potential of the Italian post-war period with the development of his own original ideas. Adding another piece to the great jigsaw of Munarian experience (never was a neologism more appropriate, given that his thinking has educated a generation of designers) is an unmissable exhibition curated by Marco Sammicheli in collaboration with Giovanni Rubino.

In the spaces that face onto Piazza Diaz, the presentation of this home-grown intelligence takes an original and unexpected approach and we find ourselves rediscovering Munari. Here there is no need to tell of the boy born in Milan in 1907, who moved to the Polesine before returning at the age of twenty to his city of origin and sharing at the cafe-tables of Brera, concrete dreams with Milanese creativity along with his individual approach to design, to teaching, to life itself and the transmission of knowledge. His talent lay not only in the elaboration of intuitions but in the way in which he managed to share his special enthusiasm for all things: driven by a spasmodic curiosity that infected everyone he encountered. Precursor of our times, Munari invited us – and still does – to never stop searching: invited everyone to discover, think and make.

He suggested looking at things with different eyes. Design as preached by the most lucid contemporary criticism, all-encompassing because it affects all the elements of our everyday life, had in truth already been conjectured in his writings: "It is necessary today, in a civilisation that is becoming mass, that the artist comes down from his pedestal and deigns to design the sign for the butcher (if he can)". Italy was undergoing great change during those years and Munari was perhaps the only thinker able to question the relationship between high culture and low culture: that, if they can reveals all his professional (and human) greatness, the depth of his thought and his j'accuse.

The approach taken by the exhibition entitled Munari politecnico is thus not a conventional one: Sammicheli began with the Fondo Munari collection of the Fondazione Vodoz-Danese (a pair of dedicated explorers of the intellectual panorama of the time) and that of the Museo del Novecento – where a room is already dedicated to Munari, a unique choice from the Italian panorama. “I was interested in highlighting the original and generative artistic matrix of every aspect of Munari’s work and above all I wanted to testify his role as a reference point for further generations of artists over the course of the twentieth century. From here I went on to add works from the ISISUF (International Institute of the Study of Futurism), from the collection of the Museo del Novecento and other private collections”, describes Sammicheli.

Munari loved to repeat: “imagination is a faculty of the spirit able to invent mental images different from the reality of the particulars or the overall: images that may also be unrealisable in practice. Creativity is a productive capacity where imagination and reason are connected so the result that one obtains is always realisable in practice”. This is the direction that the curator takes when approaching his academic research with rigour and precision to give shape to the exhibition; “this is the way in which Munari wanted to express simple ideas in an appropriate form,” he adds. It was in the same way he also approached painting, sculpture, graphics, design and teaching, confident in the public's imagination. “His works also represent a narrative, in forms, of creative processes from the point of view of the artifice. Over the course of his activity, the network of relationships woven with many other Italian and foreign artists, (Arturo Bonfanti, Max Bill, Gillo Dorfles, Franco Grignani, Max Huber and Gruppo T) enabled his work to intertwine with the articulated modernist panorama of the last century”, concludes Sammicheli.

The exhibition “Munari politecnico” continues a course that was begun in 1996 with an exhibition of works from the Vodoz-Danese collection at the foundation's headquarters, an occasion that saw the start of the analysis of the dialectical relationship between Munari and a younger generation of artists. Munari politecnico intends to mark a process of acquisition – that is still underway – demonstrating the suitability of the Museo del Novecento to permanently hold these works and enjoy an exemplary display designed by Paolo Giacomazzi, efficient and light in the way it recalls the invitation to succinctness of its celebrated protagonist: even he would have liked it. “I believe that the way in which Munari entered into the history of design is thanks to a skilful capacity to use technical advancement for expressive purposes”. Between 1950 and 1970, Munari concentrated on the machine and on “Good Design”.

It was a way of subtracting himself from the practice of painting. It was a way to capture the everyday technological world: the new forms were those of the Sputnik, televisions and cars. To bring it into art, Munari not only made many things (Strutture Continue) for Bruno Danese but also imagined an archeology of the future, taking an ironic approach to the idea itself of progress (Fossili del 2000). The programmed works (Colonna a sfere, Tetracono) form a dialogue with the functional forms of technology, in this they were among the first electronic brains but remain "objects" that are deliberately useless (Colori Rotanti, Rotori). While in the "objects" there is the intervention of the machine (Fontana Zen, Bambù, Xerografie originali, Le forchette) this is inhibited by the use of organic materials or via the unrepeatable gesture of the author. It was a way of subtracting himself from the practice of painting. It was a way to capture the everyday technological world: the new forms were those of the Sputnik, televisions and cars. To bring it into art, Munari not only made many things (Strutture Continue) for Bruno Danese but also imagined an archeology of the future, taking an ironic approach to the idea itself of progress (Fossili del 2000). The programmed works (Colonna a sfere, Tetracono) form a dialogue with the functional forms of technology, in this they were among the first electronic brains but remain "objects" that are deliberately useless (Colori Rotanti, Rotori). While in the "objects" there is the intervention of the machine (Fontana Zen, Bambù, Xerografie originali, Le forchette) this is inhibited by the use of organic materials or via the unrepeatable gesture of the author.

In a continuous interplay between art and science (Curve di Peano, Tensioni), Munari does not limit himself to mere perceptive data (Proiezioni diretti) but demands the critical participation of the spectator". Munari loved to talk to ordinary people more than to specialised critics; we discover an anthropological side characterised by the continual exchange with the personalities of his time who collaborated and shared dreams and passions with him. “He was a man among men. He desired continual exchange with colleagues, friends, scholars and more in general with people who were free and curious like children. In the exhibition this dimension is found in the gallery of correspondences that describes some of his relationships with different generations of artists with whom he has exhibited and shared similar visual research”.

Dulcis in fundo, we see Munari depicted in an impeccable fashion in the Focus section, where the exhibition continues with portraits, in parts previously unpublished, by Ada and Atto Ardessi who followed him for forty years documenting his working and non-working life.

Left: Bruno Munari, Nella notte buia, 1958, collage and gouache on cardboard, cm 70x100. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz e B. Danese. Photo Roberto Marossi. Right: Bruno Munari, Nella notte buia, 1958, collage and gouache on cardboard, cm 70x100. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz e B. Danese. Photo Roberto Marossi

Bruno Munari, Nella notte buia, 1958, collage e guazzo su cartone. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz e B. Danese. Foto: Roberto Marossi.

Left: Bruno Munari, Macchina aerea, 1959, wood, steel and enamel. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz and B. Danese. Photo Roberto Marossi. Right: Bruno Munari, Fossili del 2000, 1959, interior of thermionic valves in transparent methacrylate, cm 11,7 x 3,4 x 17. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz and B. Danese

Sinistra: Bruno Munari, Macchina aerea, 1959, legno, acciaio e smalto. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz and B. Danese. Foto Roberto Marossi. Destra: Bruno Munari, Fossili del 2000, 1959, interno di valvole termoioniche in metacrilato trasparente. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz and B. Danese

Bruno Munari, Xerografia originale, 1966, cm 25,5x38. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz and B. Danese. Photo Roberto Marossi

Bruno Munari, Xerografia originale, 1966. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz and B. Danese. Foto: Roberto Marossi

Bruno Munari, Scultura da viaggio, 1958, Edizione Isetan Tokyo bicolour cardboard, cm 30 x 30. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz and B. Danese. Photo Roberto Marossi

Bruno Munari, Scultura da viaggio, 1958, Edizione Isetan Tokyo, cartone bicolore, cm 30 x 30. Courtesy Fondazione J. Vodoz and B. Danese. Foto: Roberto Marossi