Ceramic Costumes Tiles by Giò Ponti, 1980, Set of 14

Costumi by Giò Ponti for Bardelli Ceramica, Italy.
14 New old stock 1980's ceramic tiles designed by Giò Ponti.
A beautiful complete impossible to come by set in great condition.

Il Pulcinella di Strawinsky's "Pulcinella" and Gluck's "Orfeo".

These were Gio Ponti's two principal encounters with the theatre, taking place within the same decade and cantered on La Scala: I have worked at La Scala Scenes and costumes: but Ponti would have liked to be the director and not just dress the characters and dress the stage. He had felt this way ever since he had fallen in love with the Russian ballets of Diaghilev at first sight, and then with Apia's theatre. Gio Ponti's architecture was itself almost a theatre, a stage for the moving figures that appeared and disappeared from its staircases, balustrades, balconies, and perspectives. And the clothes that he loved to designwere already costumes. Like the ones for his theatre: costumes that looked as if they were cut out of paper, that one slipped into to make them dance: total costumes, in which the wearer disappeared; the hands vanished always gloved, and so did the hair always under a hat. Simplified costumes, made to be viewed from afar, with nothing material, and still less historical, about them. So were his scenes, which had to look like mere enlargements of rapid sketches. That is to say, they were intended to allude to scenes, not to be them. To simulate the theatre. This is why Ponti wrote on his sketches, do it badly. What he loved about theatrical costume makers was their extraordinary capacity for improvisation. What he feared, and detested, were attempts at theatrical realism. It could be said that his kind of performance was the ballet, and his kind of character was Harlequin, an acrobat of grace and detachment even if -see his theatre script II Coro- he sometimes lapsed into solemnity.

GIO PONTI was born in Milan on November 18th, 1891. He graduated in architecture to the Polytechnic of his town in 1921. He carried out his activity for six decades - from 1920 up to 1970 - not only in architecture, but also in the fields of painting, design, teaching, and journalism. Planning and promoting quality, by means of exhibitions and magazines, were the univocal objectives for him, and for his meaning for future. Of the years twenty are his first architecture “neoclassic” works, the house of Randaccio street in Milan, the Bouilhel house in Garches, Paris. from 1923 up to 1930 he was the artistic manager of Richard Ginori, and he remade the entire production of the company. For Gio Ponti the ceramics was always his favorite explication, from the creation of the “animated bottles” for Ceramica d’Imola, to the various ceramic series often created in connection with architecture, such as the ceramic tiles “diamanti” of the Ceramica Joo, and also for the façades of the Pirelli skyscraper, or the Shui-Hing Stores in Hong Kong, or the Bijenkorf Stores in Eindoven Holland, or the INA palace in S. Paolo street Milan. In 1928 he established Domus magazine, that will be managed for fourty years. In 1941 he established the magazine Stile. Gio Ponti architecture, well known all over the world can be discussed in an emblematic way; if the Pirelli tower is the architectural symbol of 1950, the cathedral of Taranto and the museum of Denver in Colorado are the new symbols of 1970. In the design field, the Pavoni coffee-machine pointed out the creative reneval of design in 1950, such as also the super-light chair of Cassina. The “colored floors” for “Salzburger Nachrichten” in Salisburgo are the Gio Ponti contribution to the of the years ’70. Gio Ponti died in Milan on September 16th, 1979, he was 88 years old.