Bruno Munari

Bruno Munari was an Italian artist and designer who contributed fundamentals in many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphics) and non-visual arts (literature, poetry, didactic) with research on the game subject, infancy, and creativity.

Bruno Munari was one of the protagonists of 20th-century art, design, and graphics in Italy. Since his very first experiences in the 30s among the artists of the Second Futurism, he always dedicated his creative activity to every form of “experimentation” in the fields of painting, sculpture, design, photography, and didactics. 

As a part of his eclectic work as an artist-designer, he always paid special attention to the world of children. Never separating content from form and materials, what he designed were at once books, book objects, and games that make us think.

Bruno Munari joined the 'Second' Italian Futurist movement in Italy led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in the late 1920s. During this period, Munari contributed collages to Italian magazines, some of them highly propagandist, and created sculptural works which would unfold in the coming decades, including his useless machines and his abstract-geometrical works after World War II; Munari disassociated himself with Italian Futurism because of its proto-Fascist connotations.

In 1948, Munari, Gillo Dorfles, Gianni Monnet, and Atanasio Soldati founded Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC), the Italian movement for concrete art. During the 1940s and 1950s, Munari produced many objects for the Italian design industry, including light fixtures, ashtrays, televisions, espresso machines, and toys, among other objects. Cubo ashtray designed for Danese Milano (1957)

In his later life, Munari, worried by the incorrect perception of his artistic work, which is still confused with the other genres of his activity (didactics, design, graphics), selected art historian Miroslava Hajek as curator of a selection of his most important works in 1969. This collection, structured chronologically, shows his continuous creativity, thematic coherence, and the evolution of his aesthetic philosophy throughout his artistic life.

Munari was also a significant contributor to the field of children's books and toys later in his life, though he had been producing books for children since the 1930s. He used textured, tactile surfaces and cut-outs to create books that teach about touch, movement, and color through kinesthetic learning. Munari died in Milan on September 29, 1998.