Italy creates. Gio Ponti, America and the shaping of the italian design image

Abstract

The paper explores transatlantic dialogues in the post-war period; how America looked to Italy as alternative to a mainstream modernity defined by industrial consumer capitalism. The focus begins in 1950, when the American and the Italian curated and financed exhibition Italy at Work. Her Renaissance in Design Today embarked on its three-year tour of US museums, showing objects and environments designed in Italy’s post-war reconstruction by leading architects including Carlo Mollino and Gio Ponti.  The exhibition was hugely popular; celebrated by the public and critics as expressing Italy’s continuing "unity of the arts" and a combination of craft tradition and design innovation that offered an alternative modernity to America’s all-out industrialization.  The exhibition led to the production and retail of Italian-designed wares by several US firms, contributing to Italian design’s popularity in the States and shaping, through Gio Ponti’s action too, an image shared nowadays.