Gabriele Mucchi

Gabriele Mucchi (1899-2002) was a painter and illustrator, also counted among the pioneers of the nascent Italian design. Son of the painter Anton Maria Mucchi, a member of an important liberal family of the Emilian bourgeoisie, Gabriele spent a wandering youth following his father between his native Turin, Catania, Correggio, Bologna, where he graduated in engineering, and Rome, where he had the opportunity to come into contact with various artists and writers including the German sculptor Jenny Wiegmann, who would later become his wife. He later settled in Milan, where he was close to the painters of the Corrente group founded by Ernesto Treccani and frequented anti-fascist circles. His first exhibitions date back to the 1930s, when he was appreciated by critics in particular for his skillful use of color; In the same decade he also continued his activities as an illustrator (for example for books by Achille Campanile and Cesare Zavattini) and above all as an architect and “discoverer of forms for everyday objects”, as he liked to define himself at the time (the word “designer” had not yet entered the Italian lexicon). In this role he was a convinced supporter of the rationalist movement and between 1934 and 1945 he designed various furnishings for the Milanese workshop of Emilio Pino Crespi. During the Second World War he was a partisan and in the post-war period his painting activity veered towards the style of socialist realism, actively propagated at the time by the PCI; a style to which he remained faithful in the future decades of activity, often choosing political or denunciation themes for his works, which made him a true militant artist. Social commitment also characterised his participation in the planning of the QT8 neighbourhood in Milan, but in the following years he increasingly abandoned his activity as an architect to dedicate himself entirely to painting. He later taught at the University of Art in East Berlin, where he lived for a long time. In the 1980s his furniture was rediscovered by Zanotta and put back into production with a success that continues to this day.