Bruno munari:
revolutions of the
water mill:
(pt. 1)

— transcript

This fall I gave a public talk with slides about the work of artist and designer Bruno Munari called Little Green Riding Hood, which is available on my web site and on You Tube. I adapted part of that presentation for audio for this episode and although today’s show notes have a link to a gallery of images, this episode is designed to be listened to like a little story, so you don’t have to click on anything, you can just sit back, relax and come to Milan with me to find out what Munari got up to there. This is part 1 of 2 of Bruno Munari: Revolutions of the Water Mill.

One of the first things a visitor to Milan notices is the network of golden trams that run through the city, carouselling around the Piazza del Duomo, the 14th century square set in front of a lacy cathedral. Adjacent to the cathedral is the Rinascente department store and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II , an elaborate glass and iron domed shopping arcade with high end boutiques, like Prada & louis vuitton

When I first moved to Milan as a student, I met an American model in the piazza and he took me on a tour of the galleria, which he described with some reverence as the world’s first mall, which is mostly true. Americans will be familiar with Milan’s trams by way of San Francisco, because San Francisco's iconic trams were imported from Milan, and Milan still runs the original line. Their tramway was electrified by Thomas Edison in 1892, just a few years before Munari was born there. These sophisticated trams held a particular promise, that everyday people could travel further and faster than had been possible in the horse drawn era, comfortably, affordably, and in style. A united modern italy was still new then and it’s my impression that this was an optimistic time in northern Italy. Between the mid nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, companies like Campari, Pirelli, and Olivetti were forming, and hiring. Northern Italy was also developing into a hub of commercial publishing, with big name publishers like Mondadori and Rizzoli establishing headquarters in Milan in the early twentieth century. I should mention that Rizzoli is now a subsidiary of Mondadori. Smaller publishers also sprang up in the region, like Einaudi which was established in Turin in 1933. These publishers were supported by the strong printing industry in northern Italy. Publishers had easy access to printers like Ricordi in Milan, which had begun in 1808 as a music publisher and then grew into a colour print shop with chromolithographic technology.  

Milan is a city that  holds Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and la scala, but it’s also the home of Gio Ponti’s 1956 Pirelli tower and it hosts the iconic Salone del Mobile, our largest annual modern industrial design fair, which was established in 1961. So although it has medieval and early modern foundations, a big part of Milanese culture was formed by 20th century designers and other modern artists. Among them, Bruno Munari might be the one of the best known outside of Italy. As someone who makes children’s and artist’s books myself, it tickles me that both kinds of books are so central to Munari’s cultural contributions, even if children's books are not what he is primarily known for in Italy, where his position as an artist might be his most established identity. Munari’s own childhood began in Milan on the 24th of October 1907. But he didn’t stay there. 

When he was 6, his family moved to the countryside to run a hotel a little south-west of Venice which, like Milan, has a historic and iconic transportation system on the canals. The adige river, which ran past Munari’s adopted home, was dotted with little water mills, simple machines that could transform the current of the river into power. Munari loved the water mill where he grew up, remembering, “The sky was immense and the wind ruffled our hair. The great mass of grey water of the Adige flowed slowly past, tracing out dangerous whirlpools here and there. For me and my friends that water came from the unknown and went towards the unknown bearing pieces of wood and dead branches, Tufts of grass and uprooted bushes, sometimes strange objects and dead cats,” adding “with measured slowness it fished up wonderful weeds and water plants green and soft as glass, making them shine in the sun…and once in a while the great wheel brought up a chicken feather or piece of paper or the leaf of a tree along with the water plants.” Munari remembered standing on the planks of this small wooden mill, “as if suspended in the air, admiring the uninterrupted spectacle of colours, light and the movements of the great wheel.” 

Munari’s later interest in exploring dynamic change, currents of air and energy, his love of surprises and his fearlessness might be rooted in this childhood fascination. Munari’s ability to write as expressively as he does is part of what makes him the figure in design history that he is. Design historian Alessandro Colizzi has remarked that Munari’s memories form part of his self-created mythology, acknowledging that his rural childhood had a determining influence on his sensibility. One of Munari’s uncles, who cooked in the family’s hotel, was also a lute carver and when Munari returned to Milan as an adult, another uncle, who was an engineer, gave him work and helped to set him up there. So Munari grew up with two roots of northern Italian cultural heritage: traditional rural crafting and urban and industrial planning. From this starting point he branched out into industrial design and publishing, which were both rapidly growing sectors in his youth in milan. These professions were also synergetic with companies like Pirelli hiring Munari both to design products and catalogues advertising those products. Munari’s award-winning toys for pirelli, Zizì the monkey and Meo Romeo the cat were made with little children’s book-like catalogues to promote them. Famously, he also produced bold and experimental work for Campari, including a catalogue of poetry about love. Head offices kept a looser grip on these short-run ephemeral publications than they did on their poster campaigns, where more money was at stake. So commercial publications allowed self-taught designers like Munari to experiment while being financially supported.

A couple of episodes ago I introduced what is probably Munari’s most famous book, Design as Art and I read an essay from it called “Children’s Books”. Originally published by La Terza in 1966 as Arte come mestiere, or Art as Trade, Penguin describes their translated edition “as an illustrated journey into the artistic possibilities of modern design”. The preface to Design as Art jumps right into a defence of one of Munari’s most famous and long-running projects, his useless machines, or the Macchine inutili. 

Munari’s Useless Machines are mobiles made of paper, string, and other humble materials, like a found stone or piece of glass, which he might use to weight them. The mobiles are composed of simple geometric shapes which are often brightly coloured. Some of the machines are simply long strings of colourful shapes, almost like an unclasped necklace. Munari developed this series at about the same time as Alexander Calder was developing his mobiles. In his preface, Munari explains that Calder was like a sculptor of living trees who created mobiles structured like suspended branches with their leaves on  while Munari’s own sculptures are made of pieces that all turn upon themselves without touching. Munari’s mobiles are not organized into an organic form like Calder’s, and are more like something rube goldberg would produce than a gardener. Munari also explained that his machines were inspired by the simple forms found in abstract painting. He wanted to free these geometric forms from 2-dimensional space and to bring them into the same space where we live so they could be animated by the same air we breathe. 

Munari observes — with some humour and some frustration — how even his friends and supporters did not keep their useless machines in their living rooms, where they displayed their paintings and bronze sculptures. Munari’s sculptures were hung in children’s rooms because they were, in Munari’s words, so “absurd and practically worthless” that they caused his friends to “rock with laughter”. This anecdote should probably not be taken at face value. Putting aside whatever arguments and struggles he had working amongst other avant garde artists, Munari is someone who enjoyed a lot of esteem and affection from his peers throughout his lifetime. This is someone who was called the next Leonardo by Picasso and the most brilliant figure of his generation by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who founded the futurist movement. So don’t pity Munari too much, he is in on his own joke here. Nevertheless, he is making a serious point about how art is valued. Which materials and forms go into the living room and which go into the children’s rooms. Munari’s use of tempera painted cardstock is important, especially when we consider the degree to which he used paper and cheap pigment in his books expressively. Munari’s use of humble materials is also a formally Futurist gesture on his part and his resistance to cultural gatekeeping is in line with both socialist and populist modern art movements, and he was involved in both, but I think what he is describing is also personal. A personal feeling that he had about the neglected possibilities of art production and appreciation. The disappointment and frustration lacing the light essays in Design as art sometimes grows acidic and defiant, but at other times is resigned. 

If Munari’s friends considered his sculptures to belong to the realm of children, if adults, generally, continued to limit themselves to established hierarchies, status seeking, or vulgar commercial entertainment, why not go where the possibilities of play and paper could be taken as seriously and as not-seriously as possible: the world of children’s art and culture.

Nevertheless, Munari continued to write critically about the way the public clung to established modes of evaluating beauty and artistic worth or, worse, was indifferent. He was less austere about this than his peer Enzo Mari, who delivered some pretty thunderous polemics on commercial design. Munari’s style was more playful. As I was working on this episode, I found myself thinking of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special and its gentle frustrations. That special was produced at the same time as Munari’s Design as Art. There is a resistance in each to a creeping commercialism and a perspective that adults aren’t really engaging in a cultural conversation with children, who are seriously contemplating life. I’m not saying that Charles M. Schulz influenced Munari, I have no evidence of that. But I do think, and I say this with the deepest respect, that there is something a little bit Snoopyish in Munari’s spirit.

One of Munari’s ideas was that city landscaping should not be so uniform. He felt that a row of identical trees is the ideal of a filing clerk and not a gardener. Munari wondered whether “people would take more pleasure in walking, and find each other more easily” in a more creatively landscaped city, suggesting, “come and visit me, I live at the third magnolia. I can smell the perfume of its flowers from my window.” This creative wayfinding system is subject to seasonal cycles and regional weather systems and it is also not very practical, it’s conversational, being premised on, “What if?” or “Why not?” Like many of Munari’s concepts it’s designed to help us observe the known. We don’t often think about the way our addresses are organized and we might easily design an address number plaque without considering whether it could be replaced, for example with the scent of a magnolia. 

Munari considers a flower, an orange or a pea with the same seriousness with which he considers a car or an oil painting and although he is playful, he has his own sense of propriety when it comes to designed goods. In an essay in Design as Art called “Fancy Goods” he tells us what happens when he tries to help a “lady-friend” who has demanded from him a clever idea for a Christmas present. Munari goes about Milan finding ridiculous decorative items: scissors shaped like a flamingo, a lamp shaped like a bunch of grapes, a hammer like a fish, a cigarette lighter disguised as a revolver and so on. Munari depicts himself as stunned and disoriented by this barrage of ridiculous design, If we have gone this far at Christmas, he asks, where will we be at carnival time?” And, to add that Carnivale in Italy is celebrated after Christmas, in February, and has its roots in medieval Venice and involves masquerade, disguising oneself, and playing tricks, a bit like halloween. Traditional carnivale celebrations included things like throwing rosewater-filled eggs, which is such an elegant variation on toilet papering someone’s bushes. 

Anyway, eventually Munari suggests to his lady-friend, “let’s buy a pipe that is really a pipe, let’s fill it with real tobacco, light a match that looks like a match and works like a match, and apply it to the pipe-pipe. Let us have coffee in a cuplike cup on a table-table near our chairlike chair, and read a good book-book. And my friend gets all upset. He writes, She climbs into her Mini tarted up to look like a Cadillac and roars off into the mist, sounding like a ferrari.”

In “Fancy Goods” Munari is warning about letting the trickery of Carnivale spill out and overtake the culture generally, largely through commerce. and it’s interesting that Munari’s friend is driving a tiny British car disguised as a big American one, which I think is a curt nod at mid-century American hegemony, but let’s just say generally he is appalled at what he sees as vulgar, pointless, and dishonest design. 

The important question for us from “Fancy Goods” is: what does Munari consider a book-book? Munari specialized in making non-traditional books. In 1934, for example, he created a tin book of Futurist poetry called “l’anguria lirica” (the lyric watermelon). What is the difference between a book made of tin and a lamp shaped like a bunch of grapes? I suppose that even though each item bucks convention in its construction, it’s really about which bit they buck. The tin book questions the conventions of book production in its design, but it’s not disguising itself as anything other than a book, even though it loses the ease of systemic production offered by paper publishing. In logic, it’s similar to the fantasy of the magnolia scented street address. The magnolia replaces a number in a civic wayfinding sequence the same way that tin replaces paper in the lyric watermelon. Another way to look at the difference between the grape lamp in Fancy goods and the tin book is that the tin book isn’t a mass produced novelty good but rather an art object. Both the lyric watermelon and the magnolia scented address have more in common with Yoko Ono works than with something you’d find in a souvenir shop. I’m not talking about snobbery here, but just the network of ideas and production around each of these items, and what their intended function is as well as who they are made for. Munari seeks to erase the boundaries between forms, so that an art object is also a machine or a poster is also a mobile and so on. That’s a different mode of transformation through play than costuming or disguise.

Munari’s Unreadable Books, his Libri Illegibili, are usually wordless, which is what makes them technically unreadable. This long-running art project is similar to his Useless Machines. Each has an ironic and paradoxical title. Munari doesn’t really see his useless machines as useless and he doesn’t really see his unreadable books as unreadable. In her book Crossover Picture Books, Sandra Beckett explains that Munari is addressing readers “who feel that only text can be read” and he’s asking them “to expect a different language.” By removing the usual content, the book’s format takes centre stage and the reader may be asked to read the binding rather than a prepared piece of text. Unlike a novel or a traditional illustrated book, structure and material are the expressive components of the unreadable books and that is how they can be understood to be in the category of book-books and not in the category of lamps disguised as a bunch of grapes. 

In retrospective catalogues like Ettore Fico Museum’s Bruno Munaro Total Artist, you can see photos of some of Munari’s single edition unreadable books. These are handmade mock-ups of books never put into production. I have chosen his 1958 book Six Lines in Movement — Sei linee in movimento — as an example to look at. In this 21cm square book, six lines move about from page to page. The six colourful, segmented lines look like schematics of his useless machines and the way that the lines dance across the pages is reminiscent of Saul Bass’s famous title sequence design for the 1955 film The Man with the Golden Arm. The way the lines are animated allows the book to operate like a little paper film strip. And, as I said, the lines are very similar to some of his useless machines. Munari claimed to have liberated the geometric shapes making up his machines from abstract painting and here he places these shapes back in the 2 dimensional realm of the page. But, sequenced together in a book, these pages transform again into three dimensions. Books are a 3-dimensional object and Six Lines in Movement, like Munari’s other unreadable books, can be stood up and can take on the function of a sculpture. So there is a circulation of ideas and of forms here: paintings that transform into machines that transform into books that transform into sculpture. This is one of the reasons Munari’s book can be understood as a total object. Munari will take this kind of thing very far, as he does in his 1993 Bed book, which is made of colourful cushions stitched together in a long line looking like both a Useless Machine and like a sleeping bag. Munari’s Bed Book can be folded up, just like any other book.

The book Six Lines in Movement isn’t a published book and it’s not accessible. We can’t go out and buy a copy. But part of Munari’s practice was to create books that were available to everyone and he did this very successfully. Everyone listening to this can afford an Unreadable Book of their own because Corraini began publishing Munari’s Libro Illeggibile MN1 in 1984, and it’s still in print and in its eighth edition. It costs 5 euro or about 5 dollars.The MN1 is a 10cm square book with 28 colourful pages of different shapes and dimensions. The MN one doesn’t use glue or staples in its binding, its pages are simply stacked and folded at the centre and bound with a piece of red string looped around the middle fold. Putting this structure into words makes it sound complicated, but to understood how it is bound, just think of a cheap magazine that’s stapled together and then imagine removing the staples. Next imagine cutting a little triangular notch at the top and the bottom of the fold where the stapes were. Then a string simply has to be wrapped around it once and knotted and the notches hold the string snugly in place. That’s how the MN 1 is bound and it’s very stable and secure, but with one snip those pages could easily be pulled apart rearranged, and re-bound. The MN 1 has no colophon or title page, dropping most of the conventions of a book. This book isn’t a container for content, like images or text, rather, as I’ve explained, the form of the book is itself the content. The MN1 is an invitation to play, an invitation to find the third magnolia in Milan and have a conversation about what you observe there. Like many of Munari’s unreadable books, including Six Lines in Movement, the MN1 has a grey card cover and contains bright bursts of colour pages, like a city sidewalk with flowers breaking through the cracks. Munari’s strategy is to create an ordered stage where unexpected surprises can occur.

Corraini’s 5 euro MN1 is one way that Munari’s book art was produced cheaply and simply enough to be in the reach of any admirer. The other avenue Munari used to produce accessible artists books was commercial children’s publishing. In 1956 he released Nella Notte Buia for Muggiani, titled In the Darkness of the night in English. In a video presentation on Nella Notte Buia for the center of modern italian art, curator and designer Steven Guarnaccia describes this book as one of munari’s masterpieces, which adapts the characteristics of the artist’s book to the format of a children’s book that was available in general bookstores. Guarnaccia adds that, “Munari loved to play with different qualities of paper, inks, and his real trademarks were piercing the page with holes and having unexpected flaps at various points.”

Nella Notte Buia leads the reader through three terrains. The first section is printed on black paper with holes punched through which allow a bright dot representing a firefly to dance about showing through the black paper. Like six lines in movement, Munari uses the sequence of book pages to take on properties of animation. Little hidden details, like a cat who peers its head around the corner of a page, reward readers who look beyond the text for information. The second section in Nella notte buia is printed on translucent paper and leads the viewer through the grass, which is buzzing with lively and cute little bugs, and the third section takes the viewer down into a cave of treasures hidden under flaps. This last cave section is printed on grey, industrial cardstock. Printing something as complex as this, especially in 1956 would require a publisher with commitment to a non-narrative story and to increased printing costs and a writer and illustrator, like Munari, with a lot of printing experience. And that is something that I find so interesting about Munari . He brings a variety of literacies into his book making including art direction, and an extensive vocabulary of materials. He understood not only ink and papermaking, but, as Marnie Campagnolo of the University of Padova describes, Munari uses his understanding of technological evolution and changes in the publishing market throughout the 20th century to make his artists’ books. Munari’s facility with materials and processes are part of his poetics and this reinforces the way in which Milan’s industrial and commercial publishing history is bound up in his process. Pietro Corraini, whose family prints the contemporary edition of nella notte buia, talked about the emerging challenges of producing these complex printed books in our interview in the last episode.

So, in this part of Munari’s story, we learned how spending his youth in both rural northern Italy on the river and in urban Milan among the factories, trams,  and printing presses shaped Munari’s perspective and design. We also looked at two of Munari’s most famous works, his Useless Machines and his Unreadable Books and saw how these works connect to one another and how they became connected to children’s culture and design as part of Munari’s larger project of educating the public on the importance of playful and dynamic design and art.

In the second part of this essay, we’ll return to the water mill where Munari formed his ideas and find out what happened to it, what happened to him, as well as what iconic design pantyhose inspired him to create.

SOURCES

Sandra Beckett, Crossover Picture Books, Taylor & Francis, 2013

Marnie Campagnaro, “Materiality in Bruno Munari’s Book Objects: The Case of Nella notte buia and I Prelibri,” University of Padua, 2019

Claudio Cerritelli, Bruno Munari: Total Artist, Museo Ettore Fico, 2017

Alessandro Colizzi, “Bruno Munari and the invention of modern graphic design in Italy, 1928– 1945, 2011,” Leiden University

Corraini Edizioni & Istituto Italiano di Cultura Londra, “Play to Learn” podcast

Steven Guarnaccia, “Discover one of Bruno Munari’s masterpieces: ‘Nella notte buia’ (In the dark of the night),” Center For Italian Modern Art

Miroslava Hájek and Luca Zaffarano, Bruno Munari: My Futurist Past, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, Silvana Editoriale, 2012

Giorgio Maffei, Munari’s Books, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008

Bruno Munari, Design as Art, Penguin, 2019 (1966)

Aldo Tanchis, Bruno Munari: Design as Art, MIT Press, 1986