Friday 29 March 2024

automatic translation

Friday 29 March 2024

automatic translation

    Paolo Venini, the Milanese-Venetian master of art, design and business

    At 26 the lawyer Paolo Venini he decided to leave the productive Milan to reach Murano, with the dream of becoming an entrepreneur and giving life to his great passion: glass.

    It was 1921 since then, glass has become synonymous with glass art in the world. So much so that today Venini, owned by the Damiani family, famous for its jewelery and fine goldsmithing, is preparing to celebrate its hundred years of activity with a series of initiatives.

    Paolo Venini's passion had come to him by chance five years earlier, when Giacomo Cappellin, “Bapi” to his friends, had decided to move his antique glass shop to via Montenapoleone.
    Few things brought from Venice when the Great War had led him to the shadow of the Madonnina as a sergeant of the Red Cross. And Paolo Venini, who often passed in front of his shop, had begun to enter, to inquire, to buy.

    A friendship was born between the two and after the war, Cappellin and Venini decide to take over a furnace in difficulty. They have revolutionary ideas, they want to abandon the old eighteenth-century styles because that way of producing is now outdated. Tradition must be respected but also changed, they think.

    Thus was born the "VSM Cappellin Venini & C. ”, Where the acronym stands for Vetri Soffiati Muranesi.

    They got off to a great start, at the first Monza Biennale in '23 they exhibited the creations of the artistic director Vittorio Zecchin, a painter halfway between the Byzantine tradition and the suggestions of Gustav Klimt.

    Two years later his glasses won the “Grand Prix” at the Paris International Exposition.

    Between the two, Cappellin he was the creative, he spoke in Murano with the masters and was respected.

    Venini instead looked to business, in a very short time I had set up a network of shops in the main Italian cities and in European capitals.
    Things seemed to be going well but the disagreements between the two came out in a disruptive way precisely in 1925, the year of the European triumph. And the end of the partnership, the two separate.

    Venini keeps the shops, including the one still today next to the Basilica of San Marco, and creates his own company, the “MVM Venini & C”. (Murano Glass Masters).

    Venini is a lot careful to preserve the industrial secret of his creations, he knows that a lot is stored in the right blend of silica powders and color pigments.

    Paolo Venini overcomes the difficulties of the Great Depression after the Wall Street crash of 1929, a young Venetian architecture student and glass lover begins to collaborate: Carlo Scarpa.
    It is the turning point. The glasses of Carlo Scarpa inaugurate the long series of masterpieces of the author and this form of high craftsmanship becomes true art.

    Venini himself creates, invents the "Diamond" glass, the "Fabric" glass. He reworks the “Zanfirico” glass, builds new expressions with the “Murrine”.
    And then he cultivated new masters (Boboli among all), began to collaborate over the years with extraordinary artists, from Napoleone Martinuzzi to Tomaso Buzzi to Gio Ponti, and then Massimo Vignelli, Tobia Scarpa, Ettore Sottsass.

    Between 1950 and '53 with the exhibition “Italy at Work”, Will conquer the American market by bringing the creations of Fulvio Bianconi and Ken Scott to the Macy's window in New York, in 1952.

    Paolo Venini died in 1959, without seeing many other triumphs.
    Today the spirit and his vision remain intact, innovating in tradition, thanks to talented and enamored glass designers who have created pieces with famous names, such as the "Fazzoletto", the "Balloton", the "Opalino", the " Labuan ”and the“ Decò ”, the“ Odalisques ”and the“ Battuti ”.

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