Ossigeno

98 99 highest response to the human need for beauty. We owe to Olivetti the restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper in the Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, which took seventeen years of engagement. As we owe to Olivetti, among others, the restoration of the Brancacci Chapel and of the Crucifix by Cimabue in Florence, of the Horses of San Marco in Venice, of the Chamber of the Spouses by Mantegna in Mantua, of more than seventy frescoes, from Giotto to Pontormo, detached and restored after the Florence flood in 1966, then made circuiting to the greatest museums in the world. Olivetti has been the first company to connect some parallel initiatives of corporate communication to art. Since the early 1950s, under the promoting and mecenatist thrust of Adriano, even objects used as gifts to be given to prominent customers, suppliers or partners, reflected the artistic and cultural commitment of the company, through the creation of ad hoc art products . In the beginning were the calendars , first of which in 1951, after the selection and refined layout by Giovanni Pintori on a series of artworks by Henri Rousseau; from that moment on, the Olivetti calendars acquired growing credit in the art world and became real collections of wide-ranging artworks, whose circulation reached more than one hundred thousand copies distributed, each year consecrated to an artist or to a prominent artwork – from Pompeian frescoes to Raphael, from Van Eyck to Vermeer, from the paintings of the Japanese Nanban school to new panels by Georges Braque, to Egon Schiele, always accompanied by Renzo Zorzi’s critical notes. From 1960 on, the production of a series of original design cadeaux was initiated, such as letter openers or pencil holders, often produced within the company itself and, in most cases, designed by Nizzoli and Pintori, perfect compendiums of industrial design of which Olivetti was a pioneer. Then came the agendas , designed by Enzo Mari, enclosing each year works by emerging artists starting with Jean-Michel Folon, or renowned ones such as Balthus, Alberto Giacometti, Graham Sutherland. Riding the same wave, in 1972, Renzo Zorzi entrusted the management of Giorgio Soavi with the project of publishing a series of great literary works, using the formula of diaries, with illustration panels specially created by contemporary artists. Thus, the Olivetti strenna books were born, a succession of collectible copies until 2005, such as The Adventures of Pinoke with illustrations by Roland Topor, Death in Venice and Rosario Morra’s artworks, The Tartar Steppe illustrated by Enrico Baj, Natale in Casa Cupiell o with photographs by Mario Carrieri, Bel Ami portrayed by Carlo Cattaneo, Petersburg Tales for the sketches by Milton Glaser. A prestigious art collection , combining the artworks commissioned to furnish the Olivetti venues with those purchased during the organization of the numerous exhibitions produced by the company, brought together Guttuso and Kandinskij, Nivola and Klee, Giacometti, Morandi and Sutherland, the Critofilms by Ragghianti and the short film Kyoto by Kon Ichikawa. Landscapes, still life, abstract figurations and photographic works, even today protagonists of exhibitions linked to the avant-garde name of Olivetti: among them, Looking forward. Olivetti: 110 years of image , at the GNAM – Galleria Nazionale dell’Arte Moderna, in Rome, in 2018; Gianni Berengo Gardin e la Olivetti , closed on November 15, 2020, in the Turin spaces of Camera - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia. But, regarding the commitment to promote and spread art as the best communication of the Olivetti spirit, there was more. The company did not limit itself to organizing art exhibitions, as Adriano was proud to say, but it was able to set up what the great art critic Lea Vergine defined as the last avant- garde of contemporary art in Italy: the artistic current of Programmed Art . An avant-garde entrepreneur the likes of Adriano Olivetti can feel in his time, but he can also see into the future. In Italy, in that Piedmont home of Adriano and of a massive working class, Germano Celant – already belonging to the Visual Poetry group together with other artists such as Ketty La Rocca and Nanni Balestrini – baptized Arte Povera a poetic returning to the fundamental human themes, living in a place, living a body, recovering matter, working on raw materials offered both by nature and industry: Jannis Kounellis' coal and sheet metal, Fabio Mauri's Objets Achetés , the pile of rags at the foot of Venus by Michelangelo Pistoletto, the spirals by Mario Merz assembled starting from the Fibonacci sequence, the Sculpture that eats by Giovanni Anselmo. Europe, especially with Victor Vasarely, Jean Tinguely and Bridget Riley, experienced the optical illusions given by Op Art and Kinetic Art abstraction and dynamism. In America, while MIT was developing the first videogame in history Spacewar! and under the tutelary deity of Marcel Duchamp’s Conceptualism, Fluxus – an artistic movement that firmly believed in the power of the interdisciplinarity of the arts, in their continuous flow one in other, whose leading exponents were Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Nam June Paik and Merce Cunningham – was detonating. Simultaneously, in a period of enormous artistic ferment, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Frank Stella’s Minimal Art , carrying on the abstract theses of Pollock and Rothko, was banishing any emphasis to focus on the direct impact of pure form, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg's New- Dada transformed assemblages of heterogeneous elements recovered from everyday life and industrial waste, from Coca-Cola bottles to stove pipes, into works of art, paving the way for that worldwide Hemingway, Kerouac, Roth and Pasolini wrote milestones, but also Cormac McCarthy, author of masterpieces such as No Country for Old Men and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize The Road . Masterpieces come out of a Lettera 22, in the first decade of 2000. Which does not risk viruses or Trojans, does not fear blackouts or somebody else’s copy-and-paste, does not distract with notifications, but above all, facing a major commitment, it pushes you to think about what you are going to write. Through it, Adriano Olivetti not only embodied the best of Artistic Capitalism, cannibalizing his own products for continuous improvement and entering the most famous international art collections, but he was able to demonstrate that Italian could have been the language of globalization, as long as this would have meant to decline it in glocal , focused as he has always been on ethics. «This typewriter comes from Agliè 14 », was the advertising slogan that accompanied the Lettera 22 around the world, to underline that it incorporated a kind of work, the Italian one, made of technical and aesthetic excellence. The Olivetti method was able to shape every piece of the production and commercialization of its products: the last of these, turned itself too into art and culture, has been advertising . from the olivetti factory to the warhol factory: art is advertising With the advent of the bourgeoisie, when life became consumption, the Capitalism became Artistic, and the boundary between art and industry, and creation and communication, became thinner and thinner, to the point of making Marshall McLuhan – father of modern communication – say that advertising is the greatest form of art of the twentieth century . In fact, it has always been, from the commissions of the Church to the wishes of the power, for one simple reason: art communicates , in the most immediate and powerful way, because its universal language is image. But if, within the Artistic Capitalism, advertising is the greatest form of art, in Olivetti its mirror was also true: art has been its greatest form of advertising (and it could not have been otherwise, in one method, the Olivetti one, infused in culture). Every single person has an equal single kind of communication – as we well know today, that every single person turns himself into product through his social profile. But the Olivetti method is exemplary for the real consistency between the cultural values of the company and its, the first in Italy, communication strategy . A precise leitmotiv connected its industrial architecture, its aesthetics of the product, its advertising and editorial graphics and its intense cultural activity. In a house organ celebrating Olivetti 1908-1958 , Costantino Nivola, recalling his role as graphic director at the Development and Advertising Office, wrote that Adriano Olivetti «required that all the visual aspect of Olivetti was done on an artistic level ». Starting in 1938, with names such as Nivola, Xanti Schawinsky, Marcello Nizzoli, Giovanni Pintori, the graphic office gradually replaced the figure of the secretary/mannequin that stood out in all the sectorial advertisements, in favor of an iconography made up of light geometries, in which shapes were stylized and dried to the bare essential, to immediately convey on a visual level those values of refinement and lightness that Olivetti also pursued on a technical and mechanical level. An iconography that baptized Made in Italy overseas in the main aisle, in 1952 at the MoMA in New York, with the exhibition Olivetti: design in industry , where Leo Lionni's installations interacted with Nizzoli and Pintori’s graphics, marking the clearance of a precise imaginary, the Italian one, associated with keywords such as excellence and art, from cinema, to costume, to technique, and affixing a brand to it: Made in Italy . Renzo Zorzi , Veronese intellectual among the closest to Adriano Olivetti and director of Edizioni di Comunità since 1952, was the main pivot of the strategy that shifted the center of gravity of Olivetti’s communication from advertising as art, to art as advertising . A strategy fully endorsed by Adriano, proud of saying: « Other companies may finance art exhibitions, but we organize them » (in: Bruno Caizzi, Gli Olivetti , ed. UTET, 1962). Following the sudden death of Adriano, Zorzi – the man who, before joining Olivetti, took on the responsibility for De Silva publishing house to print If this is a man by Primo Levi, suggesting its title and after several other publishing houses’ rejection – moved to Olivetti, in 1965 and until 1986, to cover the role of manager responsible for image, design and cultural activities promoted by the company. Zorzi knew how to be the most refined creator of a corporate image based on art, picking up Adriano's baton, indicating guidelines to inspire graphic and editorial communication, product design and relations with the press, but above all organizing renowned international exhibitions, promoting Italian artistic heritage’s restoration and conservation initiatives, contributing to the creation of art books and strenna-objects commissioned to great designers and artists. And there it was, in Olivetti, art as advertising, the noblest declination of the Artistic Capitalism, the 14 Agliè is a small municipality in the Canavese area, not far from Ivrea, where Adriano Olivetti moved the assembly of the Lettera 22, to support the crisis that hit the municipality, when the town's textile factory had to close. Olivetti immediately intervened to ensure that the social equilibrium of the territory wouldn’t have been broken.