Richard-Ginori 1950

Ponti’s love for ceramics began with his appointment as art director of Richard-Ginori, but continued with inexhaustible enthusiasm throughout his entire career. The same bond, also emotional, with the company remained very strong over the years. After his resignation, submitted on the eve of the 1933 Triennale, in 1935 Ponti returned to Doccia for the exhibition L’art italien des XIXe et XXe siècles, to create the famous hands, the flowered bottles, and other unique pieces that were promptly published in “Domus” with tribute paid to the makers Radames Brettoni and Elena Diana. In the postwar years, precisely the request for some of those pieces for a 1949 exhibition organized by the Galleria Annunciata in Milan, became the occasion to get back in touch with the company’s management and return to where it all began.

The episode is marginal in Ponti’s biography, but it is significant because it reveals Richard-Ginori’s difficulty in updating its artistic direction amidst the exceptional vitality of the Italian scene in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti, Leoncillo, Agenore Fabbri, and many others werw profoundly transforming the expressive codes of ceramics. In fact, the company, engaged in a vast internal reorganization programme that included, among other things, the opening of a new factory in Sesto Fiorentino, had abandoned artistic research and was moving toward the discontinuation of the ‘modern art ceramics’ line created by Ponti almost thirty years earlier.

In April 1949 Gio Ponti enthusiastically responded to the invitation to work again with the firm, and at the end of September he received the assignment, signed by President Raimondo Visconti di Modrone, for a one-year consultancy. Ponti took on the task of overseeing the restoration of an artistic direction worthy of the name and role that, in his opinion, Richard-Ginori, due to its glorious tradition, must continue to fulfill even after the end of his mandate.

A new initiative and an important point in Ponti’s revival programme was the purchase of works by contemporary Italian ceramists, both for the Doccia Museum and for sale in the main Richard-Ginori stores. Visconti di Modrone authorized Ponti to carry out the project. On October 25, Ponti wrote to Visconti di Modrone that “the pieces for the museum will serve the Museum but also the factories to immediately make many things clear.”

The educational value of the works of contemporary ceramists was essential. Ponti is convinced that those working in the Richard-Ginori factories should be aware of what was going on outside their factory walls, in order to assist the artistic direction in renewing the line of artistic ceramics. For the same purpose, he proposed the possible purchase of antiques  and books such as “for example the Skyra [sic] color monograph on Picasso’s ceramics.”

One letter in particular makes it clear why Ponti was so keen to make available in Doccia examples of works by contemporary artists and ceramists he admired:

“From the results seen at Doccia, I can now reassure you that ‘the hands have been found’ for modelling and that we will no longer have to resort to problematic and costly purchases from outside, as we have regained our possibility of in-house creation. This artistic apprenticeship was miraculously rapid. But now we must fully enter the surfaces of the ceramics. In Doccia so far, they know nothing about the glazes used by Melotti, Leoncillo, Mazzotti, Melandri, Gambone, and Imola. It is imperative that Brown commits to this. Never underestimate the majolica department; it is from there that all our ceramics will take breath and life again, and Richard-Ginori must re-familiarise itself with pure ceramics.”

Here Ponti highlights three interconnected aspects: the rediscovered ability to shape the material with hands, without using plaster molds; the need to experiment with new glazes; and the importance of majolica, which he had identified as a typology characterizing Italian ceramics. In line with this conviction, in the 1920s Ponti had emphasized the velvety glazes and warm colors of Doccia majolica by specifically designing hand-painted decorations. However, twenty years later, the repertoire of glazes that he found available in Doccia, compared to the iridescences, drippings, and crystallizations of Melandri and Melotti or the graininess of Gambone, appeared completely inadequate to him.

Ponti then decided, to begin with, to focus on modeling and to create only white objects. His intention was to experiment with new ideas using handmade samples, saving on the costs of plaster mold production, and then to start mass production only for those models whose prototypes were well received. Rare examples of that experimentation are preserved in the Brooklyn Museum in New York and in a few private collections. Ponti himself called them ‘fantastic ceramics’ and told how they came about, almost as an experiment in free expression.

From the letters dated November 13–24, 1950, we learn that after sending several pieces overseas to furnish the ‘symbolic’ dining room of the exhibition Italy at Work, Ponti had ordered more for many of the interiors he was designing on that year.

The fantastic vein and the more playful side of Ponti’s talent emerge in this series: the armchairs, mannequins, and bird-women recall the surreal imagery of Alberto Savinio. References to the world of De Chirico, with whom Ponti was friends, also seem to surface in the idea of Freud’s chess game that Ponti suggests both to Andrea Parini and the artists of Doccia. What mattered most to Ponti is that they had the immediacy of hand modeling, combined with a naivety that he felt corresponded more closely to the expressive research of contemporary ceramics.

Ponti's consultancy assignment ended on September 30, 1950, and not only was it not renewed, but the numerous orders for the ‘fantastic ceramics’ could not be carried out because it was decided to completely abandon the production of majolica, taking a path opposite to the one indicated by Ponti. The central management's decision could not be questioned and was motivated by the passivity of the department, as well as the difficult situation created by the opening of the new plant in Sesto and the downsizing of the old Doccia facility. Ponti, dismayed, insisted, but was only granted the possibility to draw on what was already ready in stock. What disconcerned him most was Richard-Ginori’s refusal to take part in the 1951 Triennale, where a large section dedicated to ceramics was planned. The unexpected epilogue of the 1950 experience left the field open to S.C.I. of Laveno, which at the Triennale could play the ‘Antonia Campi’ card undisturbed, putting an ace on the table that was certainly difficult to counter even for the experienced Ponti.

So, while Ponti’s consultancy from the perspective of Richard-Ginori at that time was disappointing, years later the project of dedicating a space to contemporary productions within the museum and the group’s stores is perhaps the most striking aspect for its originality and modernity of vision. Realizing that, both due to contingent reasons and the structural limitations of a large industry, the company could not compete directly with the language of new ceramics, Ponti bypassed the obstacle by assigning it a role as a channel for promotion and sales. The idea of a showcase for ceramic art curated by the artistic direction was developed by Ponti not only for the benefit of the artists he would promote, or, in the case of the museum, for the training of internal staff, but also as a statement of the prestige of the Società Ceramica, which would thus assume the almost-institutional role of “mother protector and presenter of the finest Italian ceramics.” Ponti developed a prototype of what we would today call a concept store, elevating the company museum and selected shops to the level of an art gallery, in line with the promotion of Italian artists he had been carrying out for years through ship interiors, exhibition organization, and publications in “Domus.”