An illustrated journey into the artistic possibilities of modern design, by the enfant terrible of Italian art and design for most of the twentieth century

A Penguin Classic

Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as the new Leonardo. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children's books, advertising, cars and chairs--these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.

Attenzione

They say that a gesture is worth a thousand words, and when it comes to speaking with your hands, the Italians speak volumes. This quirky handbook of Italian gestures, first published in 1958 by renowned Milanese artist and graphic designer Bruno Munari, will help the phalange-phobic decipher the unspoken language of gesturesa language not found in any dictionary. Charming black-and-white photos and wry captions evoke an Italy of days gone by. Speak Italian gives a little hand to anyone who has ever been at a loss for words.

The first-ever English translation of Bruno Munari's classic treatise on creativity, replete with new contextualizing annotations

But isn't imagination also fantasy? And can't fantastic images also assume the form of sounds? Musicians speak of sonic images, sound objects. How does one invent a fish tale, an air-cooled engine, a new plastic? ... fantasy, invention, creativity think; imagination sees.
Never before translated into English, Bruno Munari's Fantasy, originally published in Italian in 1977, invites the reader to explore their own imagination, creativity and fantasy through a journey into Munari's mind and work. His theory of creativity, developed in conversation with the Reggio Emilia Approach (a self-guided approach to education) and the work of Jean Piaget (a Swiss developmental psychologist who proffered a theory termed genetic epistemology) foregrounds the book's journey through Munari's design processes, both working for clients and teaching design principles to children. By turning both life and work into a classroom, Munari unlocks a path through imagination in order to access his, and in turn the reader's, deepest sense of play.
The facsimile reprint is accompanied by new contextual annotations by Munari scholar and design historian Jeffrey Schnapp. These microinterventions highlight the innovations that make this work as relevant today as when originally published.
Bruno Munari (1907-98) 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, as well as to nonvisual arts (literature, poetry) through his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning and creativity.

In the early 1960s Italian design legend Bruno Munari published his visual case studies on shapes: Circle, Square, and, a decade later, Triangle. Using examples from ancient Greece and Egypt, as well as works by Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto, Munari invests the three shapes with specific qualities: the circle relates to the divine, the square signifies safety and enclosure, and the triangle provides a key connective form for designers.

One of the great designers of the twentieth century, Munari contributed to the fields of painting, sculpture, design, and photography while teaching throughout his seventy-year career. After World War II he began to focus on book design, creating children's books known for their simplicity and playfulness.

A playful and vibrant guide to drawing the sun

In Drawing the Sun, Bruno Munari suggests: When drawing the sun, try to have on hand colored paper, chalk, felt-tip markers, crayons, pencils, ballpoint pens--you can draw a sun with any one of them. Also remember that sunset and dawn are the back and front of the same phenomenon: when we are looking at the sunset, the people over there are looking at the dawn.

With an updated cover, this facsimile edition brings back into print the crucial 1987 overview of Munari's wide-ranging oeuvre

One of the last surviving members of the Futurist generation, Bruno Munari (1907-98) was the enfant terrible of Italian art and design for most of the 20th century. In addition to his work as an artist and designer, Munari was a prolific bookmaker and authored some 40-odd books in his lifetime, ranging from Futurist manifestoes to design manuals to children's books. Although these books have been widely read and translated into many languages, his incredible achievements in other mediums have yet to be gathered into a single collection.
This volume, originally published in 1987 and designed by Munari himself, was the first comprehensive account of his remarkable and vast oeuvre. Now available as a facsimile of the original edition--save for the updated cover--the book explores Munari's relationship to the artistic trends of his times, his attention to the world of children and didactics, and the many other peculiarities that made Bruno Munari such an original figure. The hundreds of illustrations recreate Munari's relentless inventiveness, his love of irony, chance and humor, his intensely experimental orientation and constantly fresh approach to new technologies and materials.
Bruno Munari (1907-98) was born in Milan, where he remained for most of his life. He was a proponent of the Italian Futurist movement, and one of the founders of Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC)--the Italian movement for Concrete art.

Imaginative and artistic uses for everyday vegetables, from stamp-making to beyond

The gentle genius of Bruno Munari (1907-98) offers basic instructions and plenty of stimuli, suggestions and illustrative pictures to get adults and children working together. In this volume Munari shows us how to make imaginative use of all kinds of vegetables to make fun stamps from: Never mind potatoes. Using a radicchio stalk as a stamp (all it takes is a knife for cutting and an ink pad for coloring), one can discover the flowers in the vegetable garden. And then there are irises, peppers, cabbages, brussels sprouts, tomatoes (only very firm ones are recommended), lettuces, and so on.

Photo-reportage is a means of expressing oneself more through images than words. The images can be sculpted, drawn or photographed, the medium isn't important. The urgent needs of modern publishing have turned the cameraman's chisel into a camera. In the past, to see the story narrated on the Trojan Column everyone had to go to Rome. Nowadays that column has become a roll of negatives of which the most distant reader can receive a copy at home. --Bruno Munari

First published in 1944, Bruno Munari's Fotocronache, here translated into English, was and remains one of the finest, most amusing, and most significant lessons on the uses of photography for communication. With his charming, generous wit and inimitable perceptive abilities, Munari offers a zinging analysis of the power of the image--as a communicator of specific knowledge and a site into which completely other knowledge can be read.

A visual cornucopia and an exciting testimony to the diversity and originality of Bruno Munari's art

From drawings, designs, collages, paintings, sculptures, readable and not-so-readable books to new image reproduction techniques, industrial design, editorial graphics, architecture and new pedagogical ideas, the scope of Bruno Munari's (1907-98) activities is dauntingly vast. This book accordingly approaches his output as a universe of its own, eschewing analyses of style and development in favor of offering a journey through the total art of Munari.

Accompanying a 2017 exhibition at the Museo Ettore Fico in Turin, and including more than 500 reproductions, interviews with Munari and a critical essay, this book is a visual cornucopia and an exciting testimony to the diversity and originality of Bruno Munari's art.

Escrito en 1966, El arte como oficio se ha convertido en el gran ensayo clá sico de entre todos los que escribió Bruno Munari. Este libro es un valioso y singular intento por situar la importancia de los nuevos productores de formas del mundo contemporá neo en relació n con el arte y con la experiencia personal de nuestra vida cotidiana. Con ello, Munari logra hacernos observar de una manera activa y tomar conciencia del mundo formal que nos rodea al tiempo que pone en valor la labor de los diseñ adores, personajes que no solo se erigen como responsables de la creació n de objetos funcionales y esté ticos, sino que ejercen de auté nticos moldeadores democrá ticos del gusto. Repleto de ejemplos y referencias a nuestra vida diaria, esta obra nos invita constantemente a detenernos y a repensar las formas que nos rodean. Desde la visualidad de las letras escritas o dibujadas hasta la versatilidad de un material como el bambú, pasando por el valor de una cuchara o unos peldañ os desgastados por el uso, o el brutal contraste entre las ostentosas cuberterí as europeas y la modestia de los palillos japoneses, Munari nos introduce con la facilidad y la sencillez de los grandes maestros a las grandes cuestiones teó ricas de las disciplinas del diseñ o y la creatividad.