Dino Martens

Franco Deboni

Una panoramica della produzione vetraria di Dino Martens

Biografia

Così ha detto di lui il critico Paolo Rizzi in occasione di una retrospettiva dei suoi dipinti tenuta dopo la sua morte ad alcuni suoi amici muranesi, nel tentativo di suscitare un discorso critico più profondo su un pittore ingiustamente dimenticato.

Fu probabilmente questo momento di crisi esistenziale, con conseguente graduale disinteresse per il proprio lavoro, che lo portò a decidere di partire per l'Africa come volontario nel 1935. Durante il suo periodo africano trascorse tre mesi al Forte Galliano di Macallè, custodito dall'amico Aureliano Toso, all'epoca capitano d'artiglieria, dove poté successivamente godere dell'ampia libertà di movimento concessagli dai suoi superiori per le sue note capacità artistiche.
Al termine delle ostilità decise di rimanere in Africa, spinto dalla curiosità per l'arte e la cultura locale, e continuò diligentemente a dipingere, nonostante la difficoltà di trovare nuove tele e colori adatti. I risultati furono esposti in una grande mostra personale ad Asmara, all'epoca capitale dell'Eritrea, nel maggio 1937, con ventisette opere, alcune di notevoli dimensioni, e tutte di persone, luoghi e mercati eritrei. Questo materiale, che doveva essere oggetto di una nuova mostra, è andato tutto perduto durante il viaggio di ritorno in Italia e di esso non resta altro che alcune fotografie. L'esperienza africana di Martens, però, cambierà profondamente la sua direzione artistica, non tanto nella pittura quanto nella produzione del vetro, fortemente influenzata dalle forme e dai colori dell'artigianato africano, come le trame dei tessuti africani, chiara fonte di ispirazione per i suoi Zanfirici. In effetti, utilizzerà nomi come Damasco, Algeri, Ailé e Congo per alcuni dei suoi vasi più famosi, un chiaro riferimento a un periodo della sua vita ricco di eventi emozionanti e ricco di creatività.

Al ritorno in Italia, non torna subito a Murano, ma decide di rimanere a Roma, alternando la Scuola Vaticana del Mosaico e l'ambiente del cinema della neonata Cinecittà. Qui trovò lavoro come scenografo e decoratore e, grazie alla sua conoscenza diretta dell'Africa, fu incaricato di decorare le scene di un film importante, Abuna Messias. Diretto da Goffredo Alessandrini, racconta la missione in Abissinia guidata dal cardinale Guglielmo Massaia, noto agli indigeni come Abuna Messias. Il film ebbe un grande successo, vincendo il primo premio alla 7a Mostra del Cinema di Venezia nel 1939.
Avendo concluso il suo lavoro a Roma, alla fine torna a Murano e inizia uno straordinario sodalizio vetraio con l'amico Aureliano Toso, che nel frattempo, di ritorno dall'Africa, aveva aperto una propria vetreria in Fondamenta Radi 25 con il nome di Vetreria Artistica rag. Aureliano Toso. Martens ne divenne il direttore artistico, carica che mantenne fino ai primi anni '60, affiancato da alcuni dei migliori maestri vetrai, capaci di realizzare i suoi pezzi più complicati, tra cui ALDO "POLO" BON, SILVANO SIMIONI e MARIO ZANETTI, con i quali ha stabilito quel tipo di perfetta affinità tra designer e maker indispensabile per la realizzazione di opere in vetro molto complesse.
La prima Biennale di Venezia in cui si presentò fu la 21a, nel 1940, dove la vetreria Aureliano Toso espose un gruppo molto vario di sue creazioni eseguite con nuove tecniche, tra cui l'oggetto di spicco era una strana maschera in vetro "pulegoso".
La produzione riprese lentamente nel secondo dopoguerra, quando molte vetrerie furono costrette a chiudere, ma la Biennale di Venezia, e soprattutto il Padiglione di Venezia, riaprirono solo nel 1948, quest'ultimo divenuto ormai un luogo dove i maggiori produttori di vetro di Murano poterono mostrare e confrontare le loro ultime creazioni.
Da allora fino al 1962 Martens è sempre stato presente alle Biennali di Venezia e alle Triennali di Milano, ed ha esposto le sue opere non solo in Italia ma anche in prestigiose sedi all'estero. Seguirono alcuni dei momenti più importanti della storia espositiva dell'artista, pubblica e privata, nel corso degli anni Cinquanta.
Nel 1953 la Bonniers Gallery di New York allestì una mostra con sedici designer italiani, tra cui Martens, e fu uno dei suoi vasi della serie Zanfirici che il grafico Michael De Leo utilizzò debitamente stilizzato per la copertina del depliant della mostra.
L'Istituto Nazionale per il Commercio Estero tenne una mostra a Madrid nel 1955, i Vidrios y Cristales Italianos' per la quale la vetreria Aureliano Toso prese alcuni pezzi di Martens che erano già stati esposti nel 1952 alla Mostra del Cinquantenario durante la Biennale di quell'anno.
Altro momento importante è stata la mostra tenuta dall'Istituto Veneto per il Lavoro al Röhsska Konstslöjdmuseet di Göteborg, Svezia, nel 1956. Presentava circa 180 pezzi provenienti da quattordici delle principali vetrerie di Murano ed era curata dal pittore VINICIO VIANELLO, che ne disegnò anche l'ambientazione. Martens vi espose alcuni dei suoi pezzi più fantasiosi in termini di forma e ricchezza di colori, come la brocca Concerto, in cui aveva sperimentato l'ennesimo uso del vetro Zanfirico.
Nel 1958 si tenne una grande mostra del vetro di Murano, intitolata Venedig zeigt Glas aus Murano, al Museum für Angewandte Kunst di Vienna. In questa occasione l'artista presentò alcune forme più semplici e stilizzate accanto ai suoi famosi vasi Zanfirici, alcuni dei quali già esposti l'anno prima all'XI Triennale di Milano. Questi erano i vasi "a trina", molto allungati e con fini decorazioni a canne verticali che ne sottolineano le forme snelle e ne mostravano lo stile in evoluzione verso le nuove tendenze del design contemporaneo. Nel 1959 il Corning Museum of Glass di New York tenne una mostra speciale di vetri contemporanei internazionali sotto la guida di THOMAS S BRUCHNER, l'allora direttore del museo. In mostra 1.814 oggetti in vetro realizzati da 173 diverse
vetrerie di ventitré paesi. Il comitato di selezione era composto da cinque notevoli esperti, LESLIE CHEEK (direttore del Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), EDGAR KAUFMANN JR (designer), RUSSELL LYNES (giornalista), GEORGE NAKASHIMA (designer) e GIO PONTI, figure di spicco del settore dell'arte, del design e architettura a livello internazionale. Il loro compito iniziale è stato quello di selezionare i 100 pezzi più interessanti e poi, di quei 100, ogni membro ha presentato tre oggetti che considerava i prodotti più eccezionali dell'intera mostra. Quindi una selezione finale di quindici oggetti tra cui uno splendido vaso disegnato da Dino Martens per la vetreria Aureliano Toso.

Ecco i motivi alla base della scelta del giornalista americano RUSSELL LYNES del vaso Allegria di Dino Martens, della serie Zanfirici, e le sue parole, forse meglio di chiunque altro, riassumono l'essenza di questo pezzo.

"Prendo prima la bottiglia veneziana (la bottiglia Allegria), colorata, di forma irregolare, forse (non ho provato ad usarla) ridicolmente inadatta a tutto tranne che alla decorazione. Conterrebbe dei fiori, sospetto, ma li travolgerebbe: i suoi colori sono troppo accesi, il suo disegno troppo alto e stretto al collo, e il suo motivo ornamentale troppo esigente di attenzione. Lo scelgo perché unisce la tradizionale allegria del vetro veneziano con una sensazione che è tutta del Novecento. E' carina (un aggettivo che ai nostri giorni i critici non usano più), ha dell'umorismo (fa venire voglia di sorridere) e sa chi è suo padre (e bisnonno)."

Biography

Dino Martens was born in Venice in 1894 to a family of Dutch origin. There were contacts between the Venice Republic and Holland from the late sixteenth century onwards as a result of the trade alliance set up between the two countries in Constantinople, and other cultural ties, such as the long period spent in Venice around 1620 by Constantine Huygens, the first scholar of Rembrandt.
Martens studied painting under Ettore Tito and Umberto Martina at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and began exhibiting at a very early age, first at the Umanitaria in Milan in 1911, then at the Permanente in Turin the following year. In 1913, when not yet twenty, he had his first major success in his own city, exhibiting two oil paintings at the Esposizione d’Arte raccolta a Palazzo Pesaro: Among the Rags and At San Geremia, artists of the calibre of Felice Casorati, Arturo Martini, Napoleone Martinuzzi, Teodoro Wolf Ferrari and Vittorio Zecchin. It was probably here that he became aware of the new trends in glass art, because the Baroviers were also exhibiting twelve newly conceived glass pieces that were a real milestone in what may be considered the Renaissance of Murano glass.
A strange event took place in 1914: he was asked to decorate the allegorical floats for the carnival and the Venice newspaper the Gazzettino ran a delightful caricature of him as a boy-painter.
He served in World War I and on his return resumed his painting career, which reached its peak between 1920 and 1930 with works included in the Venice Biennales and the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa exhibitions.
He showed Old Fisherman at the 14th Venice Biennale in 1924, a painting that belong to the Magic Realism current of which Antonio Donghi, Felice Casorati and, in particular, Cagnaccio di San Pietro were leading exponents..

Martens’ first professional experience with glass was probably in 1926. He briefly became a member of the SALIR (Studio Ars Labor Industrie Riunite), set up three years earlier by Giuseppe d'Alpaos, Decio Toso and Guglielmo Barbini, which specialised in "cold" processes of glass decoration, that is, enamelling and engraving. During his association with this company, he played a direct role in the production process, designing objects to be decorated with enamel and wheel engraving. Unfortunately, no photographs of these remain, though there is a large cup with enamel decoration of a rural subject. The SALIR archive also holds a preparatory drawing for a transparent, colourless glass cup decorated with players of bowls, a sport much loved by Martens and his friends and colleagues in other glassworks. The drawing is filed under number 707, but with no further information.

In that same year he married Amelia Toso and presented the painting Young Bride presumably a portrait of his young wife / at the 15th Venice Biennale, whose selection comittee included the sculptor Napoleone Martinuzzi.
This was followed in 1928, at the 16th Biennale, with The Bowlers, a subject particularly dear to him and already present on the above mentioned vase designed for SALIR.

The painting was bought by Baron Treves de' Bonfili for the then considerable sum of 20,000 lire. His activity as a painter expanded further with a solo exhibition in Naples in 1929, where the local press described him as "a very talented, young, Venetian Novecento artist."
He continued exhibiting successfully in Venice, where he showed a big painting called The Builders at the 17th Biennale in 1930. This was considered one of the best works in the exhibition and was eventually bought by the Credito Marittimo di Roma. Martens' first ventures with glass were displayed at the 18th Biennale in 1932. His friend Aureliano Toso had recently left the F.lli Toso company to join the Successori Andrea Rioda glassworks and asked him to design some glass pieces that were presented, with considerable success, albeit some reservations regarding their revolutionary use of traditional techniques. He showed some pieces designed for Salviati at the same Biennale, in simpler materials but more extreme forms, with sinuosities and asymmetries that give an idea of the future direction of his work as a glass designer.
He was also present in the mosaic section with the panel The Fishermen of St Peter, made to his cartoon by the Cooperativa Mosaicisti Veneziani and bought by the Associazione della Pesca of Ancona.
At this point in his life he would seem to have been a successful artist, supported by positive critical and public recognition, but his restless temperament made him unable to settle on a constant artistic line.

He was undecided between "a cold, northernising, but also Quatrocento-style realism, but simultaneously (and apparently contradictorily) seeking experiences that we might call Impressionistic, in the wake of what other artists, his friends and contemporaries were doing".

This is what the critic Paolo Rizzi had to say about him on the occasion of a retrospective of his paintings held after his death by some of his Murano friends in an attempt to arouse  a deeper critical discourse about an unjustly forgotten painter.
It was probably this moment of existential crisis, resulting in his gradual loss of interest in his own work, that led him to decide to leave for Africa as a volunteer in 1935. During his African period, he spent three months at Forte Galliano in Macallè, guarded by his friend Aureliano Toso, at the time a captain of artillery, and was subsequently able to enjoy broad freedom of movement allowed by his superiors because of his known artistic skills.
At the end of hostilities, he decided to stay on in Africa, driven by his curiosity about the local art and culture, and diligently continued to paint, despite the difficulty of finding new canvases and suitable paints. The results were displayed in a major solo exhibition in Asmara, at the time the capital of Eritrea, in May 1937, with twenty seven works, some of considerable size, and all of Eritrean people, places and markets. This material, which was to have been the object of a new exhibition, was all lost on his return journey to Italy and nothing remains of it except a few photographs. Martens' African experience was, however, to change his artistic direction profoundly, not so much in his painting but his glass production, which was strongly influenced by the forms and colours of African crafts, such as the wefts of African fabrics, a clear source of inspiration for his Zanfirici. Indeed, he was to use names like Damascus, Algiers, Aile and Congo for some of his most famous vases, a clear reference to a time in his life that had been full of exciting events and rich in creativity.

On his return to Italy, he did not go back immediately to Murano but decided to stay in Rome, alternating between the Vatican Mosaic School and the milieu of cinema at the newly opened Cinecittà. Here he found work as a set designer and decorator, and, because of his first/hand knowledge of Africa, he was engaged to decorate the scenes for a major film, Abuna Messias. Directed by Goffredo Alessandrini, this tells the story of the mission to Abyssinia led by Cardinal Guglielmo Massaia, known to the natives as Abuna Messias. The film was a great success, winning first prize at the 7th Venice Film Festival in 1939.
His work in Rome having then come to an end, he returned to Murano and began an extraordinary glass partnership with his friend Aureliano Toso, who in the meantime, on his return from Africa, had opened his own glassworks at 25 Fondamenta Radi with the name of Vetreria Artistica rag. Aureliano Toso. Martens became its artistic director, a position he was to retain until the early 1960s, supported by some of the best glass masters, who were capable of making his more complicated pieces, including ALDO "POLO" BON, SILVANO SIMIONI and MARIO ZANETTI, with whom he established the kind of perfect affinity between designer and maker that is indispensable for the creation ofvery complex glass works.
The first Venice Biennale in which he appeared was the 21st, in 1940, where the Aureliano Toso glassworks showed a very varied group of his creations executed in new techniques, among which the stand, out object was a strange mask in "pulegoso" glass.
Production resumed slowly after World War II, when many glassworks had been forced to close, but the Venice Biennale, and especially the Venice Pavilion, did not reopen until 1948' the latter having by then become a place where leading manufacturers of Murano glass were able to show and compare their latest creations.
From then until 1962 Martens was always represented at the Venice Biennales and the Milan Triennales, and showed his works not only in Italy but also in prestigious venues abroad. The following are some of the most important moments in the artist's exhibition history, public and private, throughout the 1950s.
In 1953, Bonniers Gallery in New York held an exhibition featuring sixteen Italian designers, including Martens, and it was one of his vases from the Zanfirici series that the graphic artist Michael De Leo used duly stylised for the cover of the exhibition brochure.
The Istituto Nazionale per il Commercio Estero held an exhibition in Madrid in 1955
the Vidrios y Cristales Italianos' to which the Aureliano Toso glassworks took some pieces by Martens that had already been exhibited in 1952 at the Mostra del Cinquantenario during the Biennale of that year.
Another important moment was the exhibition held by the Istituto Veneto per il Lavoro at the Röhsska Konstslöjdmuseet in Göteborg, Sweden, in 1956. This featured around 180 pieces from fourteen of the main Murano glassworks and was curated by the painter VINICIO VIANELLO, who also designed its setting. Martens exhibited some of his most imaginative pieces in terms of form and richness of colour, such as the Concerto jug, in which he had experimented with yet another use of Zanfirico glass.
A big exhibition of Murano glass was held in 1958, titled Venedig zeigt Glas aus Murano, at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. On this occasion the artist presented some simpler, more stylised forms alongside his famous Zanfirici vases, some of which had already been shown at the 11th Milan Triennale the year before. These were the very elongated "a trina" vases with fine, vertical cane decoration that emphasises their slender forms and showed his style moving towards new trends in contemporary design. In 1959 the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York held a special exhibition of international contemporary glass under the guidance of THOMAS S BRUCHNER, the then director of the museum. It showed 1.814 glass objects made by 173 different glassworks from twentythree countries. The selection committee consisted of five considerable experts, LESLIE CHEEK (director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), EDGAR KAUFMANN JR (designer), RUSSELL LYNES (journalist), GEORGE NAKASHIMA (designer) and GIO PONTI, five leading figures in the field of art, design and architecture at an international level. Their initial task was to select the 100 most interesting pieces and then, out of those 100, each member presented three objects that he considered the most outstanding products of the entire exhibition. There was thus a final selection of fifteen objects and one of these was a splendid vase designed by Dino Martens for the Aureliano Toso glassworks. The following are the reasons behind the American journalist RUSSELL LYNES'S choice of Dino Martens' vase Allegria, from the Zanfirici series, and his words, perhaps better than anyone else's, sum up the essence of this piece.

"Let me first take the Venetian bottle (the Allegria bottle), colorful, irregular in pattern, possibly (I have not tried to use it) ridiculously unsuited for anything but decoration. It would hold flowers, I suspect, but it would overwhelm them: its colors are too bright, its design too tall and narrow at the neck, and its ornamental pattern too demanding of attention. I choose it because it combines the traditional gaiety of Venetian glass with a feeling that is entirely of the twentieth century. It is pretty (an adjective that critics have very nearly run out of town in our time); it has humor (it makes one want to laugh with it), and it knows who its father (and great, great, grandfather) is.

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