Italian art critic, painter and
philosopher Gillo Dorfles died Friday in Milan at age 107, after
having worked in fields as diverse as medicine, architecture,
music, and fashion.
When Dorfles was born in Trieste in 1910, the city was part
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in his long life he met a
wide range of Italy's most important historical figures of the
times.
He met Italian writer Italo Svevo when he was working in a
paint factory, and was close friends with Italian poet Eugenio
Montale as well as Lucio Fontana, who he helped launch his
career.
He took coffee with Italian poets Cesare Pavese and Salvatore
Quasimodo, was a guest of Frank Lloyd Wright, and a personal
friend of Renzo Piano.
Perhaps his most important fortune and strength was the fact
that he remained lucid until the end, even participating in
mid-January of this year at an exhibition of his drawings from
2010-2016 of the character he invented called VITRIOL, at
Milan's Triennale Museum.
In terms of the secret to his longevity, perhaps it was in
his ability to continually look towards the future.
"I've forgotten a half century and I'm forgetting the other
half, because I want to live in the future," he said in a recent
interview.
"Art is the only passion to which I've always remained
faithful, since the first shocks of abstractionism of Klee and
Kandinsky," he often said.
Psychiatry was another of Dorfles' interests, and Dorfles
read from works of Jung and Rudolf Steiner.
This theme became a sort of guiding thread running through
much of his written work.
In 1948, together with Atanasio Soldati, Gianni Monnet and
Bruno Munari, he was one of the founders of MAC - the Movement
for Concrete Art, and in 1956 he contributed to the creation of
ADI, the Association for Industrial Design.
His writing is extensive and spans his many interests,
including monographs of artists from Bosch to Toti Scialoja, as
well as books on architecture, a groundbreaking text on
industrial design in 1963, and a cult classic titled "Kitsch: An
Anthology of Bad Taste" in 1968.
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