In 1927, a photographer captured the shy, lanky teenage Piero Fornasetti smiling awkwardly at the camera. “No one could see in the photograph of me at age fourteen,” he later observed, “what sort of person I would become.”
Fornasetti’s path seemed set. His father, Pietro, was a businessman and expected his eldest son to study accounting and run the family’s typewriter-import company. But Piero began retreating to his bedroom, decorating the ceilings with trompe l’oeil watercolors—whimsical women flanked by Roman colonnades, hot-air balloons, flying machines.
He fought his way into the Liceo Artistico di Brera, a prominent Milan arts high school, then fought his way into an expulsion when professors rejected his nude studies. In the 1930s, Fornasetti’s father reluctantly allowed Piero to take over rooms in the family house to work on his experiments. He played with sculpture first, then lithographs, and eventually printed books in collaboration with prominent artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, and Lucio Fontana.
The Second World War came. Fornasetti decorated the mess hall of his barracks in Milan’s Sant’Ambrogio, hid in Switzerland from 1943 to 1944, and then spent months interned at a prison camp in Deitingen, where, using a fountain pen, he drew poignant self-portraits.
The experience consolidated his yearning for success. When Fornasetti returned to Milan, in 1946, he vowed to “fill the universe with scarves and stationery stores with calendars.” A year later, the star architect Gio Ponti urged the young designer to present his ceramics at the eighth Milan Triennale. The show was a resounding success.
Within a decade, Fornasetti was a household name in Italian style. He made furniture for Italian transatlantic liners as well as lamps, ashtrays, teacups, and posters for department stores across Europe and the U.S. Up until his death, in 1988, from the sanctuary of his little shop in Via Brera, he presided over all facets of the business—small and large, from fabrics to museum curation—with the same shy stoicism that had characterized his adolescent self.
In the book Fornasetti: Memories of the Future, created in close collaboration with the artist’s son, Barnaba Fornasetti, who wrote the foreword, the breadth of Piero’s creative output unfolds across 300 pages. And it could fill 300 more. —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
