Italian Studies ISSN: 0075-1634 (Print) 1748-6181 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yits20 Visible Books, Unreadable Books: Bruno Munari’s Iconotextual Playground Pierpaolo Antonello To cite this article: Pierpaolo Antonello (2019) Visible Books, Unreadable Books: Bruno Munari’s Iconotextual Playground, Italian Studies, 74:4, 331-351, DOI: 10.1080/00751634.2019.1658919 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2019.1658919 Published online: 27 Aug 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 115 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yits20 ITALIAN STUDIES 2019, VOL. 74, NO. 4, 331–351 https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2019.1658919 ARTICLE Visible Books, Unreadable Books: Bruno Munari’s Iconotextual Playground Pierpaolo Antonello University of Cambridge ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This essay examines Bruno Munari’s innovative picture books within the Bruno Munari; 20th century broader context of his ‘major’ artistic work. Specifically, it illustrates and Italian art; children’s books; discusses how Munari’s production that is linked to Futurism, futurism; concrete art; Abstractionism, or Concrete art, has been remediated in his books and crossover picture books; artistic remediation activities for children. Munari’s work is on this score an unparalleled example of the ways the visual language of experimental art could be translated into effective and meaningful visual experiences for lay peo- ple, including children. Bruno Munari has been increasingly recognised as one of the twentieth century’s most important and eclectic artists, both in Italy and internationally. A true self-taught polymath, he has become a point of reference in fields as diverse as visual art, industrial and graphic design, children’s literature, and art pedagogy. His eclecticism led to him becoming a kind of moving target for art critics who, struggling to tether him to any critical formula or to allocate his art to any aesthetic pigeonhole, produced a number of short-cut, and somehow anodyne, labels: the ‘Leonardo of twentieth century Italian art’, ‘a total artist’,or‘anarchic and heretic’.1 Munari’s eclecticism has led to a degree of marginalisation of his work in academic discussion on the grounds of its being too ‘undisciplined’; too difficult, that is, to insert into the established lexicon of the various disciplines to which academics often make reference.2 Nevertheless, over the years Munari has attracted a sizeable following that extends beyond the conventional bounds of artistic circles and art criticism. One reason for this is a particular type of his artistic output which has received widespread popular acclaim but scant attention from art critics: his books.3 Throughout his career, Munari contributed, as author or illustrator, to almost one hundred and eighty books ranging from essays on art and design to experimental books, creative writing, didactic books, and CONTACT Pierpaolo Antonello [email protected] 1See for instance Pierre Restany, ‘Un Peter Pan di statura leonardesca’,inSu Munari: 104 testimonianze, 152 inediti di Bruno Munari, ed. by Beppe Finessi (Milan: Abitare Segesta, 1999), p. 254; Sandra Solimano, ‘Futurismo e astrazione italiana fra le due guerre’,inFuturismo. I grandi temi 1909–1944, ed. by Enrico Crispolti and Franco Sborgi (Milan: Mazzotta, 1997), pp. 58–63 (p. 62); Claudio Cerritelli, Bruno Munari Artista Totale (Mantua: Corraini, 2017). 2The only monograph on Munari available in English is the translation of Aldo Tanchis’s pioneering book on the artist in Italian in 1986, which, published under two slightly different titles in the USA and in the UK a year later, offered a general overview of Munari’s varied career: Aldo Tanchis, Bruno Munari (Milan: Idea Books, 1986); published in English as Aldo Tanchis, Bruno Munari: from Futurism to Post-Industrial Design, trans. by H. Evans (London: Lund Humphries, 1987) in the UK, and as Bruno Munari: Design as Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1987) in the USA. However, there has been a recent resurgent interest at the international level, signalled in particular by a number of important academic contributions, which have started to explore Munari’s production with some critical and historical depth, including Alessandro Colizzi,Bruno Munari and the Invention of Modern Graphic Design in Italy, 1928–1945 (PhD Dissertation, University of Leiden, 2011); Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art, ed. by Pierpaolo Antonello, Matilde Nardelli, and Margherita Zanoletti, (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017); Bruno Munari: Aria Terra, ed. by Guido Bartorelli, (Mantua: Corraini, 2017). 3For a preliminary critical assessment of Munari’s writing, see Margherita Zanoletti, ‘Word Imagery and Images of Words: Bruno Munari the Writer’,inBruno Munari: The Lightness of Art, pp. 193–226. © 2019 The Society for Italian Studies 332 P. ANTONELLO children’s literature, and even a multilingual guide to Italian hand gestures. In 2002, Giorgio Maffei produced an extensive catalogue of Munari’s work as a writer, illustrator, and book editor, Munari. I libri;avade mecum covering the entire range of Munari’s books published between 1929 and 1999.4 In this corpus, Maffei also includes the hundreds of book covers Munari designed for major Italian publishers, particularly in the post-World War II period, including Bompiani, Einaudi, Rizzoli, and Editori Riuniti, which established Munari’s reputation as one of the key figures of modern Italian graphic design. In this essay, I will focus on Munari’s works that can be listed under the conventional but increasingly inadequate heading of ‘books for children’, which in fact account for half of his published titles and the majority of those translated into English. They are also considered one of his most enduring legacies, and consequently they have attracted significant academic attention from scholars in the field of children’s literature and pedagogy.5 Ground-breaking books like Nella notte buia (1956) have assumed cult status and become landmarks in children’s publishing worldwide. Further, Munari anticipated and actively contributed to the visual revolution that took place in Italian children’sbook production in the 1960s and the 1970s.6 Other artists and graphic designers have similarly lent their trade to the production of experimental, innovative children’s picturebooks, but what is truly remarkable in Munari’s contribution is not only the range and consistency of his output, but also how ahead of his time he was in introducing ideas and inventions that have become staples of iconotextual experience for both children and adults. Munari’s democratic idea of art was guided by a pedagogical principle of increasing ‘visual literacy’ and artistic creativity amongst ordinary people, with a particular interest in increasing such literacy amongst children, in direct contrast to the strongly text-based model of education that has characterised Western cultures for centuries.7 In particular, my interest is to explore and discuss the ways in which Munari’s work travelled not only laterally through different artistic vocabularies, as has largely been the focus of art critics – from Futurism, to Abstractionism, to Kinetic art, or Programmed art – but also ‘vertically’ in a democratic and pedagogical dissemination of experimental, modernist artistic language, offering ‘high art’ to a wider audience that included children, through various forms of artistic ‘remediation’.8 In general, we could say that Munari constantly ‘remediated’ his own artistic research and experimentation, his own formal vocabulary, in a variety of aesthetic genres and across a range of forms of expression. Specifically, this essay aims to examine and discuss how the work he produced that is linked to Futurism, Abstractionism, or Concrete art, can be seen to have migrated into, and been remediated 4Giorgio Maffei, Munari. I libri (Milan: Silvestre Bonnard, 2002). English edition: Munari’s Books (Mantua: Corraini, 2008; New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015). See also Giorgio Maffei, with Luigi Di Corato, Marzia Corraini, and Riccardo Farinelli, Bruno Munari. 70 anni di libri (Prato: Centro Luigi Pecci, 2009). 5Both Sandra Beckett and Marnie Campagnaro underscore how Munari’s clean lines, playful irony, and skilled use of simplification in creating picturebooks still continue to be elements of inspiration for authors such as Katsumi Komagata, Suzy Lee, Alessandro Sanna, and Mauro Bellei. Sandra L. Beckett, Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for All Ages (London-New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 33–34; Marnie Campagnaro, ‘Bruno Munari’s Visual Mapping of the City of Milan: A Historical Analysis of the Picturebook Nella nebbia di Milano’,inMaps and Mapping in Children’s Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes, and Cityscapes, ed. by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), pp. 147–65 (p. 151). 6Loredana Farina, ‘Creatività italiana’,inLa casa delle meraviglie. La Emme Edizioni di Rosellina Archinto, ed. by Loredana Farina (Milan: Topipittori, 2013), pp. 67–78 (p. 70). 7Munari invites this not only via the specific communicative strategies that are at the heart of his books, but also through active direct interventions such as the artistic workshops for children he organised in a variety of museum contexts, beginning with a pilot event at the Galleria di Brera in 1977. See Il laboratorio per bambini a Brera, a cura