Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Artist of the day, May 15: Bruno Munari, Italian artist, designer, and inventor

Bruno Munari (1907 –1998) was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity.

Bruno Munari joined the 'Second' Italian Futurist movement in Italy in the late 1920s. During this period, Munari contributed collages to Italian magazines, some of them highly propagandist, and created sculptural works which would unfold in the coming decades including his useless machines, and his abstract-geometrical works. After World War II Munari disassociated himself with Italian Futurism because of its proto-Fascist connotations.

In 1948, Munari, Gillo Dorfles, Gianni Monnet and Atanasio Soldati, founded Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC), the Italian movement for concrete art. During the 1940s and 1950s, Munari produced many objects for the Italian design industry, including light fixtures, ash trays, televisions, espresso machines, and toys among other objects.

In his later life, Munari, worried by the incorrect perception of his artistic work, which is still confused with the other genres of his activity (didactics, design, graphics), selected art historian Miroslava Hajek as curator of a selection of his most important works in 1969. This collection, structured chronologically, shows his continuous creativity, thematic coherence and the evolution of his aesthetic philosophy throughout his artistic life.

Munari was also a significant contributor in the field of children's books and toys, later in his life, though he had been producing books for children since the 1930s. He used textured, tactile surfaces and cut-outs to create books that teach about touch, movement, and colour through kinesthetic learning.

© 2018. All images are copyrighted © by Bruno Munari or assignee. The use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained.


Mr Bruno Munari





Faces





Negative-positive

Negativo-Positivo, 1964

















Plus and minus

Munari's ABC

Munari's ABC

Munari's ABC

Book for he Museum of Modern Art

Book for he Museum of Modern Art

Geometric paper toy, red cover







Images of reality

Images of reality

Images of reality

Images of reality

Images of reality



Libro Illeggibile

Libro Illeggibile

Libro Illeggibile

 A tale of three little birds

 A tale of three little birds

Birthday present

Design as art








Faces

Faces

Faces









Architecture box

Architecture box















Scultura da viaggio



Fossile, 1979

Back to the Futurists

Useless Machines

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