Ponti’s Images of Women

By Brian Kish, Curator and Specialist in 20th Century Italian Architecture and

Design Consultant to the Gio Ponti Archives

With this statement, Gio Ponti makes it clear early on that he intends to include the fine arts in his industrial arts practice. Both designs have been owned by the family of Giordano Chiesa, the ebanista who originally made them and who had the opportunity to acquire them back from the Lucano family.

Throughout the 1920s, much of his energy is devoted to designing ceramics for Ginori at Doccia in Florence and San Cristoforo in Milan. This is how he began exploring an endless galaxy of womanhood along a sinuous line of inquiry: “My paintings are motivated by human testimony or by allegory”, he clamours in Aria d’ltalia, in concert with the themes and titles underpinning a deluge of exquisite imagery on fine porcelains, as seen in the series called Le mie donne, where a family of nine women were created, each carrying uncommon names: Donatella, Agata, Fabrizia, Isabella, Domitilla, Balbina, Emerenziana, Leonia, and Apollonia. They are depicted floating on clouds over ancient Roman cities. Among the Ginori pieces, we encounter every female archetype; from angels, imagined as unambiguously female in Ponti’s world, to witches, to Venus, the Madonna, Amazons and Sirens. He also never shied away from subjects that could then be seen as controversial such as La Perfida Camilla or Mea Lesbia from a semi-clandestine love series.

The four 1950s paintings on offer here are outstanding examples of Ponti’s most productive decade and belonged to his preferred ebanista, Giordano Chiesa. In these works, he drifts away from the shadow of Mario Sironi and Massimo Campigli that had influenced his work during the 1930s. Two among this group of four oil paintings were included in his 1955 ‘Accanto alla architettura’ exhibition at the Galleria del Sole, Milan. They were conceived to illuminate this interior space with bright hues punctuating the wall in affinity with Ponti’s latest furniture designs.

The four female subjects consist of two portraits, and two idealised depictions of women. These silhouette portraits have contrasting backgrounds, daylight (Lot 12) and night (Lot 11). The latter is further distinguished by an attribute - Ponti’s 1933 Torre Littoria - on the right, which could be a clue to the sitter’s identity. The other two paintings feature sensuously idealised women. The nude reclining on a bed skirted with ruffles reminiscent of glass crinolines adorning decanters and mirrors that Ponti designed for Venini in 1946 (Lot 8). The woman at her vanity is more complex with many illusions and conundrums (Lot 9). It is an oil painting in three colours; red, blue, and black on a glass support, again recalling a mirror. In the act of private self-beautification, the subject stares into the mirror but it is the artist’s gaze painting her portrait which is reflected, turning him, just as each of us viewers into voyeurs.

After Ponti founded Il Labirinto creative group, many projects emerged in its wake, beginning with Domus magazine, the Monza Biennale, and the Milan Triennale, all of which provided new opportunities to demonstrate his way of folding art into design and vice-versa. At Padua University in 1936, he painted frescoes, each stippled with imagery of women, many shrouded calling to mind Piero Della Francesca or even Arnold Bocklin. Around the same time Ponti was also probing the realm of sculpture, best achieved in a monumental 6-metre high plaster statue conceived for the Catholic Press Exhibition at the Vatican and meant to leave a lasting impression with the title ‘L’Italia cattolica’. The figure’s archaic bearing, however, seemed Pagan rather than Christian since it was crowned with a star instead of a conventional Christian halo.

This sculpture led to further surveys of ancient Mediterranean female imagery. The grouping of actual Tanagras that Ponti installed in his display case for the 1950 Casa Ceccatto became the inspiration for both his Dame bianche and Donne uccello white plaster figurine series of 1951 for Gabbianelli. Photographic spreads published in 1930s issues of Domus, show models and friends, all women placed by Ponti in his interior settings for the purpose of animating these spaces with life and movement. Ponti even employed himself as co-editor of a 1940s Italian women’s fashion journal Bellezza, for which he created a few covers.

Towards the end of his life, Ponti returned to painting and began experimenting with the newest materials. Painting on Perspex with fast drying acrylic colours, he reprised earlier depictions of women, this time with a more reductive approach, less identifiable references to archetypes, and a more gestural, at times abstract brushwork. At the end of the 1970s, when he was in his late 80s, he would work alone, painting on Perspex sheets propped against the windows of his top floor flat on Via Dezza. As he repeated it over and over, the female form theme became a sort of mantra for him, an incantatory practice that went on, even after he had already exhausted every possible category of womanhood.

8. Gio Ponti 1891-1979

‘Nudo di donna sul letto’ circa 1955

Oil on panel, in artist’s frame.

29.5 x 27.5 cm (11 5/8 x 10 7/8 in.)

Framed: 41.1 x 38.2 x 6 cm (16 1/8 x 15 x 2 3/8 in.)

Together with a certificate of expertise from the Gio Ponti Archives.

Estimate £5,000-7,000 $6,200-8,600

€5,700-8,000 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*

Provenance

Giordano Chiesa, Milan

Thence by descent to the present owner

Literature

‘Accanto alla architettura’, Domus, no. 312, November 1955, illustrated p. 19

The present painting was exhibited in Gio Ponti’s exhibition ‘Accanto alla architettura’ at the Galleria del Sole, Milan, in 1955.

Property from a Milanese Estate

9. Gio Ponti 1891-1979

‘Donna allo specchio’ circa 1950

Painted and reverse-painted glass, mounted on card. 27.9 x 19.9 cm (10 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.)

Together with a certificate of expertise from the Gio Ponti Archives.

Estimate £4,000-6,000 $4,900-7,400

€4,600-6,800 ‡ ♠ plus Buyers Premium and VAT, ARR applies*

Provenance Giordano Chiesa, Milan

Thence by descent to the present owner