Designer: Bruno Monguzzi, Swiss

Item: HL. 61

Title: Nouveau Salon des cent,
Hommage a Toulouse-Lautrec.

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The Designer - Bruno Monguzzi

I was born sixty years ago in Ticino - the most Southern region of Switzerland- where I spent my childhood and where I have come back. My father and my mother were very different from each other - they still were three years ago, when my father died - and my brother was very different from me. He was damned good in everything. I grew up between two conceptions of the world: the protoliberal-catholic vision of my mother, and the vetero-social-marxist creed of my father.

I have always remained a child and never ceased asking: why? An incautious adolescent who dreamed of changing the world - first with a pencil, later through revolution - it was the world, of course, that eventually changed me.

But it was in fact due to those interwoven moralisms that the search for meaning became a natural need to me, and that they, my father and my mother, unaware, became my first masters. She had the extraordinary humbleness not to understand when there was really nothing to be understood; I would then go back to my drawing table and start all over again. He, a small artisan, loved what he did with his hands, with his eyes, with his thought, and he wouldn't stop until he had accomplished perfection.

Of course I was a devoted student in school, I acquired good manual ability, I faced many dogmatisms and a few private gospels and I had to discover at my own expense that a graphic design course, even in Switzerland, was not necessarily the crucible of communications. Then I became interested in the process of perception and I continued my studies in London, where I began to understand and to love the American school, and where I found out about Studio Boggeri in the second issueof 'Neue Grafik'. On my twentieth birthday I flew to Milan. The elevator in Piazza Duse 3 was minuscule, very slow and a bit shaky. During the long ascent to the fifth floor I felt sort of disturbed, a feeling that would last for over two years. I had fallen in love with the man, with his ideas, with the studio and its balcony overlooking the public gardens.

Ten years later - except for Max Huber Mr. Boggeri always complained about the slowness of his Swiss collaborators - I fell in love with Anna, his daughter, and this time my love was not in the least platonic. Meanwhile I had lectured on Gestalt psychology and typographic design at The modesty and honesty of this typographic work were, to my surprise, honoured by the Italians with the Bodoni Prize in 1971. I have, ever since, been busy with books and exhibit design, with museography here and in Paris, but mainly I have been busy with teaching, here as well as in America. The Frenchmen too wished to honour me with a Janus Prize for my work in the new Musee d'Orsay, the Americans with a golden cube (fake), and the Japanese with the Yusaku Kamekura Award and three surreal-dadaist medals in bronze, silver and gold (the real thing). From the Swiss, renowned for their parsimony, all I got was a lot of paper. I did (with Anna) two very beautiful things. A son called Nicolas in honour of Cassandre who had just committed suicide, and a daughter named Elisa in honour of Hans Werner Henze, whom I had discovered at the time.

Today I live on a hill facing south, I still believe in the axiom 'form follows function', and I have fun - within the mandatory rush for new waves - in perpetuating those languages that our fashion system insists in wiping out.