Gio Ponti for Cleto Munari Modernist Silver Plated Serving Plate Italy, 1980s

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Gio Ponti for Cleto Munari Modernist Silver Plated Serving Plate Italy, 1980s

About the Item

Amazing mid-century silver plate serving plate. Gio Ponti designed and signed this astonishing item for Cleto Munari in Italy during the 1980s. The flat and efficient design on two round levels, make this piece simply irresistible and iconic for midcentury lovers. This piece will smarten a midcentury living room or minimal and chromed bar. This wonderful piece is in very good general condition. Dimensions (cms): diameter - 32 Giovanni “Gio” Ponti, (Milan, November 18, 1891 - Milan, September 16, 1979), is one of the Italian masters of architecture. He was also a designer and essayist and one of the most important of the twentieth century. Other than the great architectural works which carry his unmistakable signature, he created a vast amount of work in the furniture sector. This is demonstrated in his three Milanese houses which were fully furnished in the "Ponti" style. The houses in via Randaccio, 1925, Casa Laporte in via Brin, 1926 and the last in via Dezza, in 1957 is an "expression" of his home design ideas. Gio Ponti was an Italian promoter of industrial design and introduced the idea of interior furnishing ranges produced as being a "sophisticated," economic, "democratic" and modern. Molteni&C managed a reissuing project of furniture and furnishings designed by Gio Ponti for products for these private homes and limited editions. After a long journey of research, selection and study of prototypes, the collection was exhibited at the Salone del Mobile 2012. This was thanks to the cooperation and the exclusively signed agreement of the Ponti heirs and the artistic director of Cerri & Associati Studio. Gio Ponti graduated in Architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan at the end of World War I, after he fought on the front line earning military decorations. In 1921 he married Giulia Vimercati, with whom he had four children: Lisa, Giovanna, Letizia and Giulio. In 1927 he opened a studio in Milan with the architect Emilio Lancia. From the beginning of the 1920’s until 1938 he worked with Richard-Ginori Manufactory and renewed its production. In 1928 he founded the Domus magazine with Gianni Mazzocchi. In 1933 he became the artistic director of Fontana Arte which was another success after the one he obtained with Richard-Ginori. In the 1930’s he participated in the Triennale exhibitions and later he successfully managed a few of them. From 1936 to 1961 he was a professor at the Milan Polytechnic, and in 1933 was associated with Antonio Fornaroli and Eugenio Soncini, until 1945. From this partnership major projects were born, including the Montecatini Palace in Milan from 1936 to 1938, in which Ponti created the "integral design" of the building and the interiors. Other works of the period were civil architecture, including the Littoria Tower in Milan in 1933, school buildings such as the School of Mathematics at the University City Rome in 1934 and the Humanities Faculty and the Rectorate of the University of Padua in 1937. There were also residential projects such as Casa Marmont in 1934 and Milan "Domus" from 1931 to 1936. The richness of the artistic production of Cleto Munari, arises out of the discovery that every boundary is undefined, and the consequent need to create a “collection about syllables” or rather a “collection of figures” which, because of their incompleteness, luminously suggest the irrepressible quest of man’s intelligence to transfigure the world, according to his own vision. It is this a perfect complicity between the whisper of the “heart of things” and the scream of their “shape” that makes Cleto Munari, the poet of form.

Creator:
Cleto Munari (Manufacturer),Gio Ponti (Designer)
Dimensions:
Height: 0.4 in (1 cm)Diameter: 12.6 in (32 cm)
Materials and Techniques:
Silver Plate
Place of Origin:
Italy
Period:
Mid-20th Century
Date of Manufacture:
1980s
Condition:
Seller Location:
Roma, IT
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU3067329094132

Shop All Gio Ponti

Gio Ponti

An architect, furniture and industrial designer and editor, Gio Ponti was arguably the most influential figure in 20th-century Italian modernism.

Ponti (1891–1979) designed thousands of furnishings and products — from cabinets, lamps and chairs to ceramics and coffeemakers — and his buildings, including the brawny Pirelli Tower (1956) in his native Milan, and the castle-like Denver Art Museum (1971), were erected in 14 countries. Through Domus, the magazine he founded in 1928, Ponti brought attention to virtually every significant movement and creator in the spheres of modern art and design.

The questing intelligence Ponti brought to Domus is reflected in his work: as protean as he was prolific, Ponti’s style can’t be pegged to a specific genre. In the 1920s, as artistic director for the Tuscan porcelain maker Richard Ginori, he fused old and new; his ceramic forms were modern, but decorated with motifs from Roman antiquity. In pre-war Italy, modernist design was encouraged, and after the conflict, Ponti — along with designers such as Carlo Mollino, Franco Albini, Marco Zanuso — found a receptive audience for their novel, idiosyncratic work. Ponti’s typical furniture forms from the period, such as the wedge-shaped Distex chair, are simple, gently angular, and colorful; equally elegant and functional. In the 1960s and ’70s, Ponti’s style evolved again as he explored biomorphic shapes, and embraced the expressive, experimental designs of Ettore Sottsass Jr., Joe Colombo and others.

His signature furniture piece — the one by which he is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Germany’s Vitra Design Museum and elsewhere — is the sleek Superleggera chair, produced by Cassina starting in 1957. (The name translates as “superlightweight” — advertisements featured a model lifting it with one finger.) Ponti had a playful side, best shown in a collaboration he began in the late 1940s with the graphic artist Piero Fornasetti. Ponti furnishings were decorated with bright finishes and Fornasetti's whimsical lithographic transfer prints of things such as butterflies, birds or flowers; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts possesses a 1950 secretary from their Architetturra series, which feature case pieces covered in images of building interiors and facades. The grandest project Ponti and Fornasetti undertook, however, lies on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean: the interiors of the luxury liner Andrea Doria, which sank in 1956.

Widely praised retrospectives at the Queens Museum of Art in 2001 and at the Design Museum London in 2002 sparked a renewed interest in Ponti among modern design aficionados. (Marco Romanelli’s monograph written for the London show, offers a fine overview of Ponti’s work.) Today, a wide array of Ponti’s designs are snapped up by savvy collectors who want to give their homes a touch of Italian panache and effortless chic.

Find a range of Gio Ponti furniture on 1stDibs.