MUNARI, Bruno | Los Àlamos

Milan: Officina d'artegrafica A. Lucini, 1958.

12.5” x 17”; 32 pp unbound with six full-page colored seriographs by Munari; these have left offsets on the facing blank pages, producing ghost patterns; original printed wrappers, in lightly worn slipcase.

First edition of 200, this is number 64, the full edition.

In his prolific 70-year career, Bruno Munari (1907–98) became known for various contributions to art, industrial design, film, architecture, art theory, and technology—including an early model of the portable slide-projector. He liked to falsely claim that his name meant “to make something out of nothing” in Japanese. Munari’s principles and beliefs were built upon his early involvement in the Futurist movement, which he joined at the age of 19 under the pseudonym “Bum.” During the 1930s, Munari began to move towards Constructivism, particularly with his kinetic sculptures, Useless Machines (begun 1933), meant to transform or complicate their surrounding environments. Throughout his career, Munari was captivated by both a sense of whimsy and the manipulation of artificial light. After World War II, Munari also developed radical innovation in graphics, typography, and book publishing, through the latter creating pieces he would call Useless Books.

In Los Àlamos, Munari published a series of six color plates for the Lucini art graphics workshop that was accompanied by the poems of Giorgio Soavi (1923–2008), an Italian poet, writer, journalist, art critic, and longtime art advisor for Olivetti. (Soavi also collaborated with other artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, and Balthus, among others.) In this series, Bunari’s compositional technique is the result of experimentation with the accumulation of colored semi-transparent sheets, printed in a solid color or with stripes of color. The final result closely resembles the texture of certain fabrics, the patterns or lattices of a certain abstract pictorial genre.