It is very trendy nowadays to indicate on social media what's your profession, but, quite often, we let our imagination and fantasy run wild and add after our names and surnames a long list of jobs in different fields to prove we are outstandingly creative.
Yet there have been figures in the history of design that have genuinely covered various roles and positions throughout their careers, making a real and tangible difference with their unique designs. Among them there's Milanese Gio Ponti, currently being honoured at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris with a dedicated retrospective.
"Tutto Ponti - Gio Ponti Archi-Designer" (until 10th February) is a multidisciplinary journey through the 57-year-long career of the Italian polymath.
Born in Milan in 1891, Giovanni Ponti graduated in architecture in 1921; he opened his own architectural firm, but soon started nurturing a strong interest for art and in particular painting and the power of craftsmanship.
Between the early '20s and the '30s Ponti worked for the Manifattura Ceramica Richard Ginori creating for them revolutionary pieces: he often combined in his Richard Ginori designs architectural features and geometrically minimalist lines and motifs borrowed from art movements (as the years passed these pieces ended up inspiring fashion creations, including Salvatore Ferragamo's shoes). Presented at the Biennale of the Decorative Arts in Monza, the pieces won him in 1925 the Grand Prix at the Parisian Exposition des Arts Décoratifs.
In the following year, Ponti designed his first building abroad, Villa L'Ange, and collaborated with Christofle in Paris and Venini in Murano. He also developed for Italian department stores La Rinascente, a series of modestly priced furniture characterised by simple shapes and silhouettes to make sure decorative arts became accessible to as many people as possible.
In the 1930s, he focused on the construction in Milan of the Case Tipiche and offices of the Montecatini company, and produced lighting for FontanaArte, cutlery for Krupp and fabrics for De Angeli-Frua and Ferrari.
Ponti brought changes not just to architecture and interior objects, but to graphic design as well: he directed the magazine Domus until the early '40s (and then again from 1948 to August 1979), coming up with innovative covers, at times suspended between art and fashion.
During the 1940s, Gio Ponti produced monumental frescoes at the Palazzo del Bo at the University of Padua: this work marked for him a return to oil painting, but during the same decade he also worked on creating screenplays and on designing sets and costumes for La Scala in Milan.
The transition to the '50s brought two new designs on the scene: La Cornuta (1949) for Pavoni, a horizontal coffee machine with a snail shape designed to prevent the smell of burnt coffee, and the Leggera chair (1951) for Cassina (followed by the Superleggera in 1957), while in the next decade Ponti worked on architectural orders in Venezuela, the United States, the Middle East and Hong Kong.
Ponti then designed two masterpieces, Planchart Villa in Caracas and the new headquarter for Pirelli. The latter was designed in 1950 (and completed in 1961) with architects Antonio Fornaroli, Alberto Rosselli, Giuseppe Valtolina and Egidio Dell'Orto and engineers Arturo Danusso and Pier Luigi Nervi.
A decade later Ponti designed the Concattedrale Gran Madre di Dio in Taranto, one of his last large scale projects, characterised by diamond-shaped windows (one of the Gio Ponti inspirations in Riccardo Tisci's Givenchy Pre-Fall 2013 collection) that seem to frame sections of the sky.
Ponti's search for transparency and lightness is clear in the architectural facade of this building and in the openwork geometrics of a later design, the Denver Art Museum (1974).
Curated by Olivier Gabet together with Dominique Forest, Salvatore Licitra and Ponti's great-great niece Sophie Bouilhet-Dumas, the event at Les Arts Décoratifs explores different works in a time-frame between 1921 and 1978.
Visitors are greeted by a recreation of the Taranto Concattedrale facade that acts as a sort of introduction to the objects, furniture and architecture on display in the museum spaces: there's proverbially something for everybody here, from architectural drawings, photographs and models (the Montecatini building in Milan; Palazzo Bo at the University of Padua; Casa Ponti in via Dezza, Milan; the hotel Parco dei Principi in Sorrento and Villa Planchart in Caracas) to interior design pieces and textiles (it is worth remembering that Ponti created fabrics, but also designed a Visetta sewing machine in 1949).
Apart from featuring pieces made in collaboration with other companies and manufacturers, there are also objects created with craftsmen including ceramic, glass and goldsmithery pieces.
Ponti favoured surface effects and intriguing colour combinations, loved to play with shadows and lights and injected a poetically sublime weightlessness in his furniture. According to him art, architecture and design had to come together in a house to guarantee to the people living inside it not just a comfortable living space, but also genuine inspiration. Design had indeed to be functional and practical, but it also had to stand out.
The principle behind this event, including over 500 pieces, some of them showed in France for the first time, is borrowed from the slogan "from the spoon to the skyscraper" attributed to the Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969). Ponti was indeed a prolific creator, a quintessentially modern figure who combined crafts with industrial design and was therefore capable of working well on all sorts of projects, from small objects to buildings.
This exhibition is recommended to all those young creative minds who may not be so familiar with Ponti, but it is also a great opportunity to discover Ponti's modus operandi and the way he seemed to effortlessly move from one medium to the next thanks to an all-encompassing approach that meant he was equally interested in architecture and in the decorative arts (something that Alessandro Michele at Gucci has been trying to do, working between fashion and interior design and doubling as Creative Director at Richard Ginori...). "Tutto Ponti" is a long journey through the archi-designer's opus, but it is also a cause of celebration for the museum: in the '70s the Musée des Arts Décoratifs had tried to arrange an exhibition, but the project was cancelled when Ponti died in 1979. Almost forty years later, Les Arts Décoratifs has kept its promise, bringing Ponti to Paris and renewing his design legacy.
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