Gino Sarfatti (portrait)
Gino Sarfatti is described as “the genius of the lamp”, “an artist of lighting”, in a Casamica article. He played a pioneering role in the 1950s, also linked to the name of his company, Arteluce, the first Italian company committed to creating modern forms for lighting. When asked “What do you think you are? An artisan?” he replied “Yes, I am an artisan exactly”. (1) Born in Venice in 1912, an aeronautical engineer by training, he became a manufacturer and even a salesman, founding a company, Arteluce, in 1936. A multifaceted personality, creator, craftsman and entrepreneur. He recounts “One day, a friend of my father’s asked me for a lamp, a desk lamp. And he asked me to mount a beautiful abat-jour on a Murano vase. Terrible… But I took an initiative. I put a reflector in the vase. The reflector was part of a coffee machine that a small factory in Milan produced. I chromed the inside and got a lamp that gave a light for writing and then a light to illuminate the whole room, an indirect light. I started from there.” (2)
In the 1930s in Italy, a new bourgeois intellectuality was established where the presence of the ‘industrial’ movement prevailed. Gino Sarfatti felt the need to produce and market his own objects. In 1939 he set up Arteluce. In 1941, due to the war, his family had to leave Milan. In 1945 he returned to Milan. The shop in Corso Matteotti 12, designed by Zanuso, became a meeting point, a cultural reference point for designers. She met and frequented Franco Albini, Ludovico Belgiojoso, Vittoriano Viganò, Vito Latis, Ico Parisi, Gianfranco Frattini and Marco Zanuso. Sarfatti continued to design and produce lamps that remained, for the 1940s and 1950s, the only example of lighting fixtures congenial to the new architectural movements. (3)
(1963 – Arteluce shop in Corso Matteotti – Photo courtesy: Pinterest)
The young architects used Arteluce in their architectural lighting design projects, commissioned by the rich and cultured Milanese bourgeoisie, who rebuilt their image also through the prestige of their homes, places for meetings at a high social level. In November 1954, at the 10th Triennale, models 1063 and 1065 won the “Grand Prize”. He won numerous prizes including the Compasso d’Oro in 1954 for the model “n°559” and in 1955 for the “Chromium-plated stem chandelier, 1055/S”. His inventions ranged from using materials that were innovative at the time, such as perspex, acrylic, translucent resins, combining them with more traditional materials, to experimenting with new systems. In 1956 his lighting fixtures revolutionised the idea of domestic lighting. Among the founding members of the Italian Design Association (ADI).
“First of all, his prolificacy: compared to the greats of lighting fixture design, whose names are linked to relatively few models, Sarfatti’s abundance of production is surprising, as if he were working not only on a single project but on a general concept of the lamp, which he was gradually refining and realising in the multiplicity of models he designed, sometimes approaching the restyling of models from the 1950s and sometimes advancing more advanced, “mechanistic” concepts (to use the term dear to Gio Ponti)”. (4) Another characteristic of Sarfatti, which distinguishes him, is his professional specialisation in lighting fixtures, not expanding production to other domestic products, as other designers did.
“With him, a particular way of ‘making design’ came to an end, a modern industrial and commercial tradition, but also with characteristics of high-level craftsmanship, open to the particular, ‘tailor-made’ needs of friends and architects who came to see him in his ‘workshop’ in Corso Matteotti”. (5)
In the archives of the Castiglioni studio, in the section Design, there are catalogues of “Arteluce, lighting equipment” with a display in Via Spiga 23, Milan. The lamps are described in detail:
(1958 – “2097-50” hanging lamp for Arteluce – Gino Sarfatti – Photo courtesy: Catalogue Arteluce)
(1964 – “1090” floor lamp for Arteluce – Gino Sarfatti – Photo courtesy: Catalogue Arteluce)
(1966 – “600-p” table lamp for Arteluce – Gino Sarfatti – Photo courtesy: Catalogue Arteluce)
(1968 – “599/n” table lamp for Arteluce – Gino Sarfatti – Photo courtesy: Catalogue Arteluce)
(1969 – “2130” suspension lamp for Arteluce – Gino Sarfatti – Photo courtesy: Catalogue Arteluce)
(1971 – Table lamp “607” for Arteluce – Gino Sarfatti – Photo courtesy: Catalogue Arteluce)
His son Riccardo Sarfatti recounts: “The early projects had a surprising innovative charge. My father’s strength was his direct contact, even manual contact, with materials, which led him to have those surprising intuitions with which he was able to find solutions that were completely different from those that had been done up until then. (…) He always tried to simplify his products and remove as much as possible; I think this was a characteristic of the designers of the time, Franco Albini did it too, and my father had a special relationship with him”. (6)
Bibliography:
(1) Gino Sarfatti, Galerie Christine Diegoni, 2008, Frederic Leibovitz Editeur, Paris
(2) Gino Sarfatti, Galerie Christine Diegoni, 2008, Frederic Leibovitz Editeur, Paris
(3) Lux: Italy 1930-1990. The architecture of light, Piero Castiglioni, Chiara Baldacci, Giuseppe Biondo, 1991, Berenice, Milan
(4) Lux: Italy 1930-1990. The architecture of light, Piero Castiglioni, Chiara Baldacci, Giuseppe Biondo, 1991, Berenice, Milan
(5) Lux: Italy 1930-1990. The architecture of light, Piero Castiglioni, Chiara Baldacci, Giuseppe Biondo, 1991, Berenice, Milan
(6) La fabbrica del design, Giulio Castelli, Paola Antonelli, Francesca Picchi, 2007, Skira, Geneva-Milan
