MOBILI E INTERNI DI ARCHITETTI ITALIANI
Lisa Licitra Ponti and Enrichetta Ritter [Editors],
William Klein [Designer]
Lisa Licitra Ponti and Enrichetta Ritter [Editors], William Klein [Designer]: MOBILI E INTERNI DI ARCHITETTI ITALIANI. Milano: Editoriale Domus, November 1952. First edition. Slim quarto. White cloth stamped in yellow. 128 pp. 348 black and white illustrations. 13 color photo illustrations. Glossay. Elaborate graphic design throughout by William Klein. Bold former owner ink signature and embossed address stamp to half title page. Glossy pages shadowed quite yellow to textblock edges. White cloth a bit grubby with slightly darkened spine. A nearly very good copy. Scarce.
8.75 x 12 hardcover book with 128 pages, 348 black and white illustrations and 13 color photo illustrations masterfully assembled by Lisa Licitra Ponti and laid out with the most up-to-date—circa 1952— mise-en-page by William Klein. Also includes a useful glossary of design terms translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, and Japanese.
A superb adjunct publication from Editoriale Domus, highlighting the best and brightest designers and products emerging from the carnage of Post-war Europe. Each specific area of interest—Kitchens, Fireplaces, etc.—features a lengthy selection of photographs and images, many culled from Gio Ponti’s Domus magazine. Ponti can be felt lurking behind the scenes of nearly every page of MOBILI E INTERNI through the impeccable selection of included materials to the contemporary layouts. Did we mention the book design and typography were by William Klein?
Examples of contemporary Italian furniture and interior design by 48 designers as selected by the editors of Domus magazine:
- Vocabolario inglese
- Vocabolario francaise
- Vocabolario tedesco
- Vocabolario spagnolo
- Vocabolario svedese
- Vocabolario olandese
- Vocabolario giapponese
- Editoriale
- Elementi di fantasia
- Tavoli e sedie
- Librerie
- Scrivanie e studi
- Camini e soggiorni
- Stanze da letto
- Guardarobe e cucine
- Terrazze e scale
- Lampade
- Indice degli architetti citati
Designers include Franco Albini, Gianni Albricci, Melchiorre Bega, Lodovico Belgiojoso, Franco Bettonica, Sandro Bigliani, Vittorio Borachia, Margherita Bravi, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Franco Campo, Anna Castelli Ferrieri, Luisa Castiglioni, Paolo A. Chessa, Mario Cristiani, Carlo De Carli, Gianfranco Frattini, Enrico Freyrie, Guido Gai, Ignazio Gardella, Edoardo Gellner, Eugenio Gerli, Carlo Graffi, Gustavo Latis, Vito Latis, Carlo Mangani, Angelo Mangiarotti, Roberto Mango, Roberto Menghi, Carlo Mollino, Giorgio Moro, Carlo Pagani, Ico Parisi, Enrico Peressutti, Giovanna Pericoli, Gio Ponti, Ernesto Rogers, Mario Roggero Federico, Augusto Romano, Alberto Rosselli, Carlo Santi, Giglio Tarone, Mario Tedeschi, Paolo Tilche, Guglielmo Ulrich, Giuseppe Vaccaro, Vittoriano Vigano, Marco Zanuso and Renzo Zavanella
“Those who make books have long known (and some still know) that the choice of a character and the space surrounding it is part of the act of reading, humbly but closely linked to the text itself. But that is still not the most direct use of lettering, which can be found, in [William] Klein’s work, as a privileged element of reality: in advertising panels, city signals, graffiti, as stop or parking or free or smile, signs that integrate it in other messages. It can be found in the fireworks of Times Square, colourful, luminous, moving, a cinema before the letter — it was by conjugating the latent cinema reality with that of the camera that Klein, in his Broadway by Light of 1958, discovered pop art. . . .”
“The trouble with people like [Klein] is that we tend to cut them into pieces and to leave each piece to the specialists: a film to the film critic, a photograph to the photographic expert, a picture to the art pundit, a sketchbook to nobody in particular. Whereas the really interesting phenomenon is the totality of these forms of expression, their obvious or secret correspondences, their interdependence. The painter does not really turn to photography, then to the cinema, he starts from a single preoccupation, that of seeing and communicating, and modulates it through all the media.” — Chris Marker