<<Note from the editor:>>

While it is true that everyone knows a different Munari, Aldo Tanchis’s essay sets out to outline the poetics underlying the entire activity of Bruno Munari, a unique and multifaceted character, bringing together the three classic distinctions of « Munari-artist, » « Munari-designer » and « Munari-pedagogist ».

Tanchis, a researcher, writer and screenwriter, starts from the artist as a child, from his life in the Venetian countryside, an enormous reservoir of natural suggestions that would always animate all his production, and recounts his artistic production as an activity at the service of life and closely connected to it.

From his first artistic experiments to the works that made him famous all over the world, this volume collects and recounts Bruno Munari’s work, his relations with the artistic trends of his times, his attention to the world of children and didactics, the peculiarities that made him an always original figure: futurist among futurists, abstractionist among abstractionists, linked to the trends that changed contemporary graphics, animator of concretism and « good design, » theorist of programmed art.

Aldo Tanchis thus presents in these pages Munari’s « world, » a system always in dynamic balance between pairs of opposites and complementaries.