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One could write a whole book on the relationship between designers and museums, a theme that in the XX century was translated into a prolific and multidisciplinary dialogue. Today we want to recall some iconic installations and few designers to show you how Italian design has left its strong mark even on museography.
Especially between the 1960s and 70s the exhibition layout trend was to set objects free from their fixed support or from their predefined environment: detach it from the wall to use it for mobile supports studied with wisdom to enhance the relationship between environment, spectator and work of art. The crucial element that distinguishes the designer's approach to the installation is the richness and variety of materials chosen to be in perfect harmony with the work itself.
In the 1980s and 90s, with different and more and more provocative ideas, the designer became the real star of installations, exhibitions and new museums. And, today, in the 2000s, the design and fashion industry has mostly taken over the traditional departments of museums, just think of the blockbuster exhibition Alexander Mcqueen - Savage Beauty held at the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 2011.
Carlo Scarpa, born in 1906, graduated in Venice in 1926 as a professor of architectural design, is perhaps the designer who has left the strongest mark on Italian museography. In 1948 he created his first exhibition design, on the occasion of Paul Klee's retrospective at the Venice Biennale, giving vent to his craftsmanship and fervent creativity. An example of how Scarpa's mastery of one of his skills, the art of glass, in his projects is given by the staging of the exhibition on Antonello da Messina in Sicily. On this occasion, the large windows of the rooms of the Palazzo Municipale in Messina were screened by frames covered with pink and sky-blue silk fabric, in order to gently filter the light making it watery and iridescent like an opal glass.
But perhaps the highest expression of the very close relationship between the work of art and Scarpa's curatorial project can be identified in the staging of the first major Italian retrospective of Piet Mondrian's work at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome in 1956. On that occasion, Scarpa aimed to transform the rooms of the Gallery into neoplastic environments: the rooms, separated by frames soaked in lime and plaster - a clear reference to Burri's work - left full space for the abstract forms created by the Dutch artist, a scheme that he himself made his own for future curatorial and architectural projects.
Among the other Italian designers and architects who worked on the setting up and rearrangement of exhibitions and museums, it is also worth mentioning Franco Albini. As early as 1941 he designed for an exhibition at the Pinacoteca di Brera, a rationalist network of steel cables that went from the ceiling to the floor to support paintings, an idea that he reused over and over, at the Triennale for example, and which later became the mainstay of his famous bookcase designed for Cassina in 1956. Also memorable was his re-arrangement of the collections of Palazzo Bianco and Palazzo Rosso in Genoa, an approach that can still be partially appreciated today and that stands out for the uniformity given by the technical material shown to the naked eye and set in place of decorative elements such as frames.
Ignazio Gardella, BBPR studio, Gae Aulenti, Lina Bo Bardi are among the other names that deserve a mention in this field, but we will dedicate another article to them. Stay tuned!
