The doors opened on the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes on 28 April 1925 along the Esplanade des Invalides in Paris, the left and right banks of the Seine and around the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais. The event had great ambitions; one in particular was to encode the alphabet of that modern style, the peak of the Art Deco movement that took its name precisely from an abbreviation of “decorative arts”, the stars of the Paris Expo. It was also a perfect opportunity for the manufacturing industries of the twenty-one, mostly European, participating countries called on to amaze visitors with the best of their productions.
As is well illustrated in the exhibition Art Déco. Il trionfo della modernità, curated by Valerio Terraroli and open until 29 June at Palazzo Reale in Milan, Italian excellence instantly caught the international audience’s eye: the Murano-based glassmaker V.S.M. Cappellin Venini & C., managed by Giacomo Cappellin and Paolo Venini, presented vases, bowls and trays designed by its artistic director Vittorio Zecchin, winning the Grand Prix (although unfortunately during the Expo the two partners separated); Società Ceramica Richard-Ginori, with the ceramic vases, cistas and pitchers by Gio Ponti, all fascinating yet complex productions that brought new life to the classic patterns, borrowed from archaeology, so dear to the Milanese architect. Besides, Ponti had his own idea of modernity that, as he wrote in a famous aphorism, doesn’t consist in “adopting four squared pieces of furniture”, but if anything has to do with the re-elaboration and intelligent synthesis of models of the past. One example is the majolica vase La Casa degli Efebi, an ode to the transformative power of architecture: hand-painted by the artistic department of the manufacturing company, it portrays ancient architectural elements in which elegant ephebes move (or rest). Or again, the majolica vase Prospettica, inspired by classical perspective rules used to create an illusion in which each of the cells drawn on the surface in turn contain a tiny vase, bowl or geometric shape.
Gio Ponti, who worked for Richard-Ginori from 1922, was not only their art director “ante litteram” but was also a brilliant innovator of the conventional ceramic language that in those years began to work with industrial techniques such as moulding. Attentive to all production phases, Ponti periodically travelled from Milan to Sesto Fiorentino, where the manufacturing took place, to see the results of his ideas for himself, and corresponded frequently with the head of the artistic sector. “Ponti played a role that he somehow invented himself, that of the art director who defines the company’s areas of development,” the design critic Domitilla Dardi explained in a conversation with Valerio Terraroli. “In that period the foundations were laid for that which after the war was to become “Made in Italy”, through the transformation of artisanal workshops into manufacturing industries, seeking to bring craft skills into industrial mass production.” In this respect, Dardi and Terraroli also mention the group Il Labirinto, founded by Tomaso Buzzi, Emilio Lancia, Pietro Chiesa, Paolo Venini, Michele Marelli and Ponti with a view to designing and producing luxury furniture, vases, lamps, fabrics and furnishing complements, also presented at the III Biennale in Monza in 1927. “Ponti brought together other names from the design world and, in doing so, anticipated that which still happens today in the artistic management of renowned Italian brands, building a catalogue of different authors,” the two scholars conclude.
