Tomás Maldonado (1922-2018), born in Buenos Aires, was a lecturer in Industrial Design in Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic, a chair he established in 1994. Before that he had taught in Bologna (’76-’84), a couple of years at Princeton and, between ’55 and ’67, at the Ulm School, known as ‘The New Bauhaus’, of which he was director. An exponent of corporate image, which led him to teach subjects such as visual communication, semiotics and information theory, when he met Inge Feltrinelli, Giangiacomo’s recently widowed wife, he switched from operational design to a more intellectual role, writing many books published by the publishing house in Via Andegari; born a painter, he was a founding member of the Argentinean avant-garde group Arte concreto and played an important role in the development of modern art in Latin American countries. He lived with Inge for over forty years, dying just over two months after her.
Maldonado thus entered with full rights, both as an intellectual and artist and as the companion of a great friend, into the circle of my mother Giorgina [Venosta], among other things an art consultant with her own company. Mum kept a frame hanging in her house with a photographic composition that is now in my archive, and as well as including one of the artist’s works (which was, incidentally, exhibited in a solo show in Lugano in 2015), it combines two images that testify to Maldonado’s close relationship, seated in the centre of the sofa, Giorgina (on her right) and one of her mother’s lifelong friends, Donatella Brustio (on Maldonado’s left), wife of architect Pierluigi Cerri, all of whom were themselves long-standing and close friends of Inge Feltrinelli.
Bibliography:
Tomás Maldonado “Works 2000-2015”, Galleria Allegra Ravizza, Lugano, December 2015 – January 2016
P. PANZA, Morto Tomás Maldonado, designer and multifaceted architectural theorist, in “Corriere della Sera”, 26 November 2018 (modified 29 November 2018).
G. CAPROTTI, Le Ossa dei Caprotti. Una storia italiana, Milan, 2023
