At the end of the 1940s, the Concrete Art Movement was founded in Milan. Great contemporary artists such as Bruno Munari, Jean Monnet, and Luigi Nervi were affirming the synthesis of the arts – painting, architecture, and design. They were aiming at finding a language capable of translating the artist’s intuitions into concrete images, pure games of color-form that were tasked with enhancing rhythm and formal interactions.
To this day, the development of Milan is the immediate result of what these major artists – up to the most contemporary ones – have spread in almost a century. The credit for the development of the city also goes to all those great architects who redesigned, modulated and thought it to get a new, more international, cosmopolitan, cultured vocation.
Thus, one of the biggest events returns to Milan: the Salone del Mobile and its Fuorisalone.
The city explodes with colors and many events open to all the curious and industry insiders. But…when was Design born? Is it really a modern-day invention? Is it so different from the beginnings of handicraft and pottery during the Neolithic era? Does not the well-known bucket chair where the Mona Lisa sits belong to Design?
Everyday objects, furniture and furnishings were included as objects/subjects in works of art. The throne of medieval Madonnas, the draperies the artist used to decorate his/her works, the opulence of crowns, the richness of still life paintings from Fede Galizia, as well as Piranesi, to the famous works of Van Gogh – which minutely described his room, his furnishings. Among these artists Cézanne should be mentioned as well. He loved practicing with color by taking jugs, glasses, vases, cutlery, fabrics that decorated corners of kitchens or tables with fruits and flowers.
Among the contemporary artists most interested in the symbolism and meaning of furniture and its accessories, we could undoubtedly mention the Swiss painter Félix Vallotton. Admirer of Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, he was linked to the Nabis group and through his interiors and his still life paintings, anticipated in some ways surrealism.
What about Wassily Kandinsky’s early experiments with color on works depicting interiors? Simple ploys that served the artist as an exercise: from concrete forms – those of interiors, furniture – to more abstract forms.
Therefore. When was Design born? What is Design basically. What is the difference between artist and designer, painter and designer?
Answering the question of whether drawing objects is a way to overcome fear, Ettore Sottsass replied thus, “Absolutely. Art is a way to overcome fear. A way of trying to end up in the unknown, to stop this unknown somehow.”
Whether it is painting an object or drawing it, and then giving it form, a concrete use in short, is the designer, or the architect who creates it, also an artist?
We look forward to the week of April 17-23. Let the exhibition begin.
Opening image: Bedroom in Aintmillerstrasse, Wassily Kandinsky, 1909