Bruno Munari (1907–1998) was a brilliant Milanese polymath who spent seven decades dissolving the boundaries between fine art, industrial design, and graphic communication. Famously dubbed "the Leonardo of our time" by Picasso, Munari believed art should be integrated into daily life, viewing the book as the ultimate, democratic medium to speak directly to the public.
Munari authored and designed more than 40 titles, radically redefining what a book could be. Instead of treating them as passive containers for text, he transformed them into tactile, interactive experiences:
- Libri Illegibili (Illegible Books): Begun in 1949, these groundbreaking works were stripped entirely of text. Munari used translucent parchment, colored tissue papers, threads, precision cuts, and torn edges to tell a story purely through the tactile and visual sensation of turning the pages. In 1955, MoMA featured these objects in a landmark exhibition.
- Supplemento al dizionario italiano (1963): One of his graphic masterpieces, this book is a charming photographic index of Italian hand gestures and facial expressions. By documenting these non-verbal traits, Munari created a visual lexicon meant to communicate universally, transcending language barriers.
- Xerografia: Documentazione tecnica (often known simply as Xerografia) is one of Munari’s most radical and brilliant explorations of technology as an artistic tool. Published in 1970, it serves as both an artist's book and a technical manifesto documenting his experiments with a brand-new medium of the era: the electrostatic copier (the Xerox machine).
- Children's Literature & Didactics: Munari revolutionized books for children by rejecting rigid moral tales in favor of sensory exploration. In titles like Nella nebbia di Milano (In the Fog of Milan), he used layered tracing paper to mimic the experience of walking through a foggy city, transforming reading into an imaginative game of discovery.
Beyond his experimental bookmaking, Munari wrote foundational texts that remain staples of design education today:
- Design and Visual Communication (1968) explores how visual language functions and how designers can communicate complex ideas simply and precisely.
- Design as Art (1966) and Da cosa nasce cosa (One thing leads to another) dismantle the elite status of the artist, championing the idea that functional, everyday objects should solve human problems beautifully and accessibly.
Through his prolific publishing, Munari proved that a book is not just something to read, but an object to be felt, played with, and experienced.
Look Inside
The first reprint since its original publication in 1970 of Bruno Munari’s legendary artist’s book Xerografia: an intimate insight into Munari’s pioneering experiments with the Xerox machine, in which technology becomes a tool for poetic and visual exploration.
Focusing on Munari’s experiments with the Xerox 914 Machine, which began in 1963 and would continue throughout his entire career, the presentation brings a selection of works documented in his seminal book Xerografia: Documentazione sull’uso creativo delle macchine Rank Xerox. Published in conjunction with Munari’s participation in the 1970 Venice Biennale, to which Munari contributed a Xerox machine to an experimental laboratory within the Biennale, the book provides instructions on the many ways to subvert the commercial machine’s function to create original images and artworks. Ranging from abstract to figurative, Munari’s Xerox works distort the original subject as he moved images across the devices surface for the duration of the scanning process.