Movimento Arte Concreta

Italian art movement founded in Milan in December 1948 by the critic (and at that time painter) Gillo Dorfles (b 1910), the artist and architect Gianni Monnet (1912-58; the originator and leader of the group), Bruno Munari and Atanasio Soldati (1896-1953), a painter who had been working in an abstract idiom during the 1930s. They were inspired by the growth of CONCRETE ART in Switzerland and immediately attracted a large following with other Italian artists, among them Galliano Mazzon (b 1896), Luigi Veronesi, Mario Nigro (b 1917), Mauro Reggiani (b 1897), Ettore Sottsass and Amalia Garau. In Turin, Naples and Florence, other groups of Concrete artists formed that had links with the Milan group, which disbanded after Monnet's death in 1958. MAC had no rigid programme or manifesto: despite its name, its adherents did not discriminate rigorously between what they termed 'Concrete art' and more generic abstract or geometric art, which did not flourish in Italy. In Milan the group brought together those few artists who had rejected the tradition of Novecento Italiano and who did not accept the artistic and ideological attitudes of social realism. Similarly, some years after its foundation, when non-representational art became prominent, MAC defended the positions of rationalism and perceptive rigour and was in fact responsible for the diffusion in Italy of the theories of Gestalt psychology and rejected automatism, irrationalism and profusion of sentiment in non-figurative works. MAC's theoretical antagonism towards non-representational art was not, however, borne out coherently in the works produced by its members, which, particularly after 1954, reflected the influence of action painting. The most interesting of MAC's activities was the publication of their monthly and, from 1954, annual bulletins, the graphics, typography and layout of which were truly innovative: they included such features as a square format, transparent paper and pages cut into shapes or sewn together (for which Munari was mainly responsible), and they contained articles on design, on visual perception, on the synthesis of the arts and on the reproducibility of art work.