A Mythological Hand with 45 Fingers.

The
Olivetti Advertising Office in the 1930s

Giuliana Altea(&)

Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche e Sociali,

Università di Sassari, Sassari, Italy
altea@uniss.it

Critical interest in Olivetti has never been so strong. Studies on the Ivrea company
continue to stream in from a diverse range of fields including economic history, the
history of social thought, that of literature, that of architecture and those of design, and
graphic design.1 With regard to the latter discipline, however, and in particular the
theme of the overall definition of the company’s image in the second half of the 1930s,
the picture is still unclear, in spite of growing scholarly interest. Beyond general and
broadly agreed upon points, there is a dearth of solid information reconstructing the
early years of the Olivetti Advertising Office. The organization of the work, the rela-
tionships between the collaborators, and their respective roles in producing the material
all remain hazy. There are various reasons for this historiographic difficulty: a scarcity
of relevant documents in the Olivetti archive; the proverbial reticence of the only major
figure from that period who lived long enough to theoretically be of assistance, Gio-
vanni Pintori (in part because one of the effects of the success of his late work was to
obscure his beginnings); but also and most importantly the basic approach that gov-
erned the company’s activity, namely the tendency to privilege collective over indi-
vidual work and the overall nature of the project over individual contributions. Right
from the beginning, in 1931, the first director of the Advertising Office Renato Zvet-
eremich cautioned against the use of “unilateral intelligences,” deemed overly focused
on a single goal.2 Within the office, each and every design task was shared and
conceived as an integral part of the company’s broader operational horizon. While this
holistic approach to design can be an obstacle today to acquiring accurate, detailed
historical knowledge, it is also one of the most interesting aspects of the Olivetti vision,
an element that reconnects it to Milanese culture between the wars.
During the 1930s, Adriano Olivetti led the Ivrea company in the launch of an inno-
vative business policy, guided by a social philosophy that touched every area, from
production to city planning, from the design of a product to its presentation, all the way up
to communication. When the Advertising Office moved to Milan in 1932, the new office
located at via Clerici 4 and headed by Zveteremich, it marked a turn in the company’s
communication strategy. Its language was updated in a modernist key, beginning with
projects entrusted to artists like Erberto Carboni, Luigi Veronesi, Ricas (Riccardo

1
Recent studies include: De Giorgi and Morteo (2008), Fiorentino (2014), Toschi (2018), Carter
(2018, 2019).
2
Zveteremich, Organizzazione Ufficio Pubblicità Olivetti, company document, 1931, Archivio
Olivetti, Ivrea.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

E. Cicalò (Ed.): IMG 2019, AISC 1140, pp. 1–15, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41018-6_4
2 G. Altea

Castagnedi), and Bruno Munari, as well as Studio Boggeri, one of the cornerstones of
graphic modernism in Italy as well as the first Italian firm to use various collaborators
headed by an art director.3 Those who worked for Boggeri include the Swiss artist Xanti
Schawinsky, who brought his experience as a member of the Bauhaus to Olivetti from
1934 to 1936. His stripped down, precise designs exploit the structure of the page at the
expense of narrative. The space of the graphic field has the leading role, for example, on
the cover of the 1934 brochure for the M40, an image that plays on the tension between the
oblique ovoid shape surrounding the logo (redesigned in a simplified Pica font by
Schawinsky) and the one that encloses a detail of a typewriter keyboard, which are in turn
placed in dialogue with a motif of dotted lines and circles, while the name of the product at
lower right anchors the image, lending some stability to the dance of geometric shapes
(Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Xanti Schawinsky, M40, 1934. Brochure cover.

The machine aesthetic was obviously congenial to the Bauhausler Schawinsky, but
the artist also had a talent for coming up with striking solutions when dealing with
more traditional themes. One such case is that of a photomontage4 for an advertisement

3
Monguzzi (1981).
4
The image, an offset print, is described as a photomontage for a calendar in Monguzzi (1981, 4).
 A Mythological Hand with 45 Fingers 3

for the MP1. Variously dated 1934 or 1935, it depicts a young woman resting her hands
on the typewriter keyboard, her face shadowed by the brim of her hat (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Xanti Schawinsky, photomontage for MP1, 1934.

In probable response to a request from his client (which wanted to use the female
image to communicate an idea of the lightness, user friendliness and glamor of Oli-
vetti’s first portable typewriter), Schawinsky used a clearly seductive figure, echoing
the poses and allure of the divas of Italy’s white telephone films (although the model
was in reality just a simple employee in charge of testing the machines.5 The hat in
particular communicates the message of the machine’s transportability, while the color
added to the photograph evokes the object’s elegance, available in different hues.
Subject aside, however, the image’s appeal and the way that it immediately catches the
viewer’s attention are rooted in its structural coherence and the absence of elements
superfluous to the message: woman and machine are the sole protagonists, and not

5
Fiorentino (2014, 143–144).
4 G. Altea

necessarily in that order. The dress and hat have been stripped of detail, and even the
woman’s face, depersonalized by makeup and photo retouching, is deliberately generic,
all in stark contrast with the machine, which is pictured in the fullest detail. The
keyboard is positioned frontally and takes up the entire foreground, while the model’s
face is slightly turned and given just a hint of dynamism by the tilt of her hat. Her hands
rest on the keyboard, reduced to two horizontal elements by the foreshortening, and
close the composition like a buckle.
The forward impetus of Olivetti’s communication strategy continued after
Schawinsky left for the United States to escape the increasingly oppressive political
climate in Italy. In the second half of the 1930s, the Advertising Office developed a
unique graphic style, thanks to an internal staff that reinforced and gave unity to the
company image. As Renzo Zorzi wrote years later, “a company’s image cannot be the
fruit of the work of agencies and outside firms, no matter how brilliant. It has to be the
result of an integration of energies, wills, skills, and vocations that can only be found
inside the company.”6
However, the break with the past went beyond the close integration of the com-
pany’s components and matters of style (with the abandonment of the traditional
approach of artists like Dudovich and Pirovano, with whom it had worked previously),
also and most importantly entailing an “open” approach to the work, which trans-
formed the office into a place of encounter and cultural exchange and a highly active
center of cross-fertilization between different fields. Beyond the quality of the work,
which was high but perhaps not as brilliant as what came later, after the war, this
character is what determines the special interest of the graphic design produced by
Olivetti in the 1930s.
And, from this point of view, its relationship with the architecture milieu is fun-
damental. When Adriano Olivetti took up management of the company in 1933, he
immediately brought in some of the greatest exponents of Milanese Rationalism. The
points of reference were Giuseppe Pagano and—until his death in 1936—Edoardo
Persico, two leading figures on the Italian architecture scene who joined forces in 1933
in the battle for modernism fought through their magazine Casabella. Others who were
directly involved in Olivetti projects were the architects Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini
and members of the firm BBPR Gian Luigi Banfi, Ludovico Belgioioso, Enrico Per-
essutti, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers Astarita (2012). Looking more specially at graphic
art, we find not only Schawinsky and the other artists mentioned above but also Guido
Modiano, the typographer for Casabella, a magazine whose avant-garde position was
also reflected in its graphic design, overhauled by Persico in 1933 in an elegant,
essential style.7.
Pagano and Persico, charismatic figures on the Milanese design context, were also
teachers at ISIA (Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche), Monza, where the former
taught Art Criticism and the latter co-taught the Graphic Design and Advertising course

6
Zorzi, Relazione per audiovisivo, Milan, December 17, 1973, Archivio Storico Olivetti; cited in
Fiorentino (2014, 122).
7
The recent reawakening of interest in Schawinsky has not extended to his Milan period and it was
not explored in Blume et al. (2015).
 A Mythological Hand with 45 Fingers 5

with Marcello Nizzoli (a the future lead designer at the Ivrea company). Their students
included Costantino Nivola and Giovanni Pintori, two young Sardinian artists who
made an important contribution—especially the latter—to the development of Olivetti’s
graphic design.8 In addition to Nivola and Pintori, other students from ISIA were also
called to work for the company, some just for a brief time, like their fellow Sardinian and
inseparable companion, the ceramicist Salvatore Fancello,9 and others for longer peri-
ods, like Algarotti and Giuseppe Guzzi. Through Pagano’s intermediation, the “three
young Sardinians” Nivola, Pintori and Fancello,10 considered among the most
promising students at ISIA, found themselves working in the lively experimental
atmosphere of the Triennales and major propagandistic exhibitions of the fascist regime.
Nivola and Pintori worked on the Esposizione dell’Aeronautica Italiana in 1934; Nivola
and Fancello on the 1936 Triennale and the Mostra del Tessile Nazionale in Rome in
1937; Nivola on the Italian Pavilion at the Paris Expo in 1937; and all three, together
with Zveteremich, on the Mostra della Montagna in Turin in 1938. Periodic events that
experimented with strategies for stimulating the psychological engagement of the public
through the unity of the arts, the major Italian exhibitions of the 1930s were founded on
teamwork and overcoming disciplinary limitations and the traditional antinomy between
the two worlds of creativity and production.11 All aspects that we also find in the
production of the Olivetti Advertising Office in the second half of the 1930s and that
contribute to defining its uniqueness on the advertising scene in Italy and beyond.
Interdisciplinarity was the norm on via Clerici, which was a meeting place not only for
artists and architects but also poets and writers: Cardarelli and Vittorini, Gatto and
Quasimodo, Penna and Sereni all passed through the Olivetti offices,12 and some of
them, including Vittorini and Gatto, were occasionally commissioned to write slogans
and other advertising material. As for teamwork, it was the very base of the activity of
the Advertising Office and the whole company.
In 1936, after Schawinsky’s departure, the Advertising Office had its first perma-
nent staff: Nivola and Pintori under the director Zveteremich. Zveteremich, long a
rather vague figure in Olivetti historiography, was recently the subject of research
reassessing his work as an art director.13 Nivola described him as “a strange, exuberant
and extremely ambitious person” who, initially hostile to him, later took him under his
wing, “believing that he had finally found what he was missing: a clever hand for his
eccentric but gifted mind.”14 In an interview, Nivola recalled, with irony, his aggressive

8
See Altea and Camarda (2015); Musina (2013). Nivola was hired in autumn 1936, recommended by
the parents of his future wife Ruth Guggenheim, who were friends of Olivetti, as well as Pagano, to
assist with the Piano Regolatore della Valle d’Aosta, an Olivetti enterprise that in the end came to
naught. It was Nivola who suggested hiring Pintori, who joined the team immediately after.
9
For Fancello, who died painfully young on the Albanian front in 1941, see Altea and Stringa
(2016).
10
For Nivola, Pintori and Fancello in Monza, see Cassanelli et al. (2003).
11
See Stone (1998).
12
For Sinisgalli’s recollections, see Sinisgalli (1955, 23). For those of Nivola, see Baggiani and Pinna
Parpaglia, unpublished interview with Nivola (1980), Nuoro, Ilisso Archive, 34.
13
Colizzi and Bazzani (2014).
14
Nivola (1988).
6 G. Altea

manner and lavish spending: “This Sveteremich used to take me to the big hotels, he
would treat everyone horribly … He was arrogant, spared no expense with Olivetti’s
money Pintori was terrified of him. Pintori is a very unassuming man. Sveteremich
bought everything, he would say, ‘what do you need, cameras?,’ and Pintori would say,
‘we don’t need them, I’m handy, we’ll buy some old cameras, I know what to do …”15.
While Nivola’s recollections open up a spirited new window onto everyday
dynamics in the Advertising Office, they betray a certain intolerance for Zveteremich’s
style as director, which was a source of possible workplace tension. Zveteremich had a
remarkable nose for choosing collaborators and headed some of the department’s most
important projects, including 25 anni Olivetti, which, designed by Munari in 1933,
introduced modernist solutions like photomontage, the album format, sans serif type,
printing on cellophane and a spiral binding. On the cover, a stream of workers flows
along the factory façade, the photomontage drawing its dynamism from the use of two
different points of view—one from above, the other from below—for the crowd and the
building. This scene is juxtaposed with an image of mechanical parts, evoking the
company’s technological side, overlaid with the title in outline font. The two-part cover
effectively, if a bit schematically, expresses the Olivetti credo that the world of pro-
duction and the human reality of factory work are inseparable (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Bruno Munari and Ricas, 25 anni Olivetti, 1933. Brochure cover.

Zveteremich and Adriano Olivetti were in daily and constant contact, and the
former seems to have been an intelligent interpreter of the latter’s ideas, although it
would appear excessive to attribute the advertising director, rather than Adriano, with
the “humanistic” approach of Olivetti communication, as has been argued based on
programmatic statements made in Organizzazione Ufficio Pubblicità Olivetti, a

15
Nivola in Baggiani and Pinna Parpaglia (1980, 33–34), Nuoro, Ilisso Archive.
 A Mythological Hand with 45 Fingers 7

company document published in 1931.16 In light of the general orientation that Adriano
Olivetti imprinted on the company, it is more natural to think that Zveteremich simply
gave theoretical shape to his boss’s indications. In any case, after the tortured pro-
duction of a regional plan for Valle d’Aosta (the Piano Regolatore della Valle d’Aosta),
the direct line between Zveteremich and the company head slackened, until the former
handed in his resignation in July 1938, a move in Nivola’s view motivated in part by a
desire to join the regime’s propaganda machine.17
His exit from the company would seem to have been a friendly one, since it was
Zveteremich, as he himself stated, who recommended his own successor, Leonardo
Sinisgalli, the “poet engineer” whose inclination for blending science and humanistic
culture would have appealed to Adriano Olivetti. There were a number of projects on
the table at the time. In a letter from Adriano Olivetti making for arrangements for the
handover and dated July 1938, we find, in various stages of completion, a poster for the
Olivetti Studio assigned to Nivola, a “demonstration” brochure for the M40, the setup
of the Milan store, a brochure for the MP2 assigned to Erberto Carboni, and a brochure
titled Storia della scrittura.18 The latter, which the 1938 letter says was in its final stage
(“it just needs to be printed”), was one of the Advertising Office’s most important
projects in the 1930s, although the information that we have about its creation is
unclear. While it is generally agreed that Schawinsky drafted the initial plan and that
the text was undoubtedly written by Sinisgalli, there is disagreement over the artistic
direction of the project and the author of the images. Caterina Cristina Fiorentino
attributes them respectively to Sinisgalli and Nivola; Alessandro Colizzi to Zvet-
eremich and Schawinsky; Alberto Saibene to Sinisgalli and Pintori.19 In regard to
Zveteremich’s role, the letter from July 1938 is clear: if the brochure was ready to be
printed when he handed in his resignation, then he must have been the one who
directed the project. Moreover, Nivola recalled in an article published in 1988 in
Notizie Olivetti that he had completed work planned by Schawinsky: considering,
among other things, that once he found success as a sculptor, he ascribed little
importance to his work as a graphic designer, there would seem to be no reason to
doubt his word.20 In any case, it is confirmed in a photograph taken in the Olivetti
Office in 1938, which shows him working on the images for the inside of the brochure.

16
Colizzi and Bazzani (2014, 8).
17
“This Zveteremich got a big head, he thought that, since war was coming, he wanted to get involved
with the national propaganda … He was a strange one. Everyone treated him well while he was at
Olivetti, he was a spender, but then when he left Olivetti, they all closed the doors in his face, he
went to Rome …” Baggiani and Pinna Parpaglia (1980, 33). A trip to Rome with Pagano in August
1938 having born no real fruit, Zveteremich continued working in Milan, including, among other
things, consulting for the advertising agency controlled by the regime, UPI (see Colizzi and Bazzani
(2014, 13–14)).
18
Letter from Olivetti to Zveteremich, Ivrea, July 13, 1938. Archivio Storico Olivetti. The graphic
designer assigned to the “demonstration” brochure for the M40 is not noted; it seems unlikely that it
was the one produced by Schawinsky in 1934.
19
Saibene (2017). Saibene also notes that there is a draft in the Olivetti archive for a caption by Mario
Labò for the 1938 Triennale that attributes the graphic design to Schawinsky, the text to Sinisgalli,
and the cover Nivola.
20
Nivola (1988).
8 G. Altea

The photo appears to have been staged (the artist is posed adding a touch of color to a
design that is already complete), but it is improbable that Nivola would have chosen to
pose in that way with someone else’s work (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Costantino Nivola at the Olivetti Publicity Office, Milan 1938. Photographer unknown.

The image that he is “working” on in the photo is the one for the last three pages of
the brochure. A large rectangle stretches across the whole area, like a slightly curved
sheet of paper suspended in midair, its color changing in intensity from left to right,
from pale pink to gold. The rectangle serves as a background for a shower of colorful,
hand-drawn letters and numbers and is broken by three curvilinear openings in varying
shapes. The first, an oval, frames the black shadow of a large white “O” (the “O” of
Olivetti) that floats in front of it; the second reveals a detail of a typewriter keyboard;
and a female hand holding a roll of paper comes out of the third. The last two pages
were overlapped with various texts that are not visible in the photo (nor is the key-
board), since they were inserted later during the printing process.
Nivola held Schawinsky in great esteem, and the design reveals the care with which
he interpreted the Swiss artist’s approach. Although trained as a graphic designer, and
under first-rate masters like Persico and Nizzoli, before Olivetti Nivola had worked as a
painter and creating displays; the task of continuing a project begun by his older
 A Mythological Hand with 45 Fingers 9

colleague must have struck him as something of a challenge.21 The continuous com-
position draws on Schawinsky’s example, as well as Persico’s teaching,22 and other
aspects revealing Schawinsky’s influence include the use of organic shapes and the
detail of the keyboard within one of them, similar to the one in the 1934 brochure for
the M40. We also find cut-out organic shapes on the first three pages of Storia della
scrittura (in this case framing fragments of ancient writing paired with works of art
from the past), which seem to be attributable to Schawinsky (Figs. 5 and 6).

Fig. 5. Costantino Nivola, pages from Storia della scrittura, 1938. Leaflet.comando

But in spite of all of the clear references, Nivola’s composition has a different tone,
as we see from a quick comparison of the brochure for the M40 by the Swiss graphic
designer and Nivola’s designs for Storia della scrittura. The former is dominated by the
masterful articulation of the layout with blocks of writing, which function like building
blocks in the architecture of the page. In the sections of the 1938 brochure that we
propose are attributable to Schawinsky, the effect of the vertical bands that cross over the
sheet also shifts the accent to the structural logic of the layout, counterbalancing the fluid
movement of the shaped stripe that hosts the steady flow of photographs.
Whereas in Nivola’s design, the phantasmagoria of the confetti-like letters, the play
of transparencies, the pale palette, and the detached hand (a mannequin’s hand, as we
discover in the photo of the artist at his work table) divert attention from the layout of
the composition, however precisely calculated, to evoke vaguely magical and myste-
rious atmospheres. The hand-drawn (rather than printed) letters, the use of pink for the

21
“Some of the projects that Svetteremich [sic] assigned to me were beyond my abilities. For example,
the one for completing a brochure on the typefaces of Olivetti typewriters that had been started by
Santi Shavisky [sic], a top-notch German artist coming from the Bauhaus.” Nivola (1988).
22
Persico had introduced the continuous, horizontal page back in 1930, when he was an editor at
Belvedere. On Persico as a graphic designer, see Modiano (1935 [but 1936], 231–232).
10 G. Altea

Fig. 6. Xanti Schawinsky, pages from Storia della scrittura, 1938. Leaflet.

background, and the tapering hand give the overall image an unambiguously feminine
feel. Even the keyboard, closed within the curvilinear shape, ends up resembling a
woman’s torso. The photomontage for the cover of the brochure, which can also be
attributed to Nivola, moves in the same direction: here, the motif of the female hand
returns, holding up the letter “A” against an ancient epigraph, the iridescent surface of
which varies in hue from red to yellow to blue (Fig. 7).
The fantastical and allusive tone of these images beautifully interprets Sinisgalli’s
texts, in which, in agreement with Olivetti thought, technology is not seen as a force
opposed to humanity but rather an element capable of strengthening its harmonious
development and increasing its “magical possibilities.”23 Manual skill and technology
and past and present coincide in an advertising message that relies not so much on facts
as on sensations and subtle evocations. The temporal excursus traced by the photos on
the first pages of the brochure naturally ends with the typewriter, a modern and at the
same time almost magical tool, in the end simply a “much more organized and sensitive
hand, a mythological hand with forty-five fingers.” (see footnote 23).
The insistence on temporal continuity reflects a well-tested practice in early
twentieth-century advertising, namely that of bringing modernity back to what is
already familiar, in order to defuse the potentially disturbing charge of innovation.24
This strategy had been broadly used in other Olivetti advertising as well, starting with

23
Sinisgalli (1938).
24
Meikle (1995).
 A Mythological Hand with 45 Fingers 11

Fig. 7. Costantino Nivola, Storia della scrittura, 1938. Leaflet cover.

the well-known Rosa nel calamaio, also from 1938 and probably a collaboration
between Pintori, Nivola, and Sinisgalli,25 in which the romantic image of the flower in
the old, by now useless inkwell is isolated on the white page, which is transformed into
a Cartesian plane by the two orthogonal lines dividing it (Fig. 8).
The metaphysical aura of the Rosa nel calamaio and the tension that the image sets
up between poetry and technology are traceable to Sinisgalli, whose arrival at via
Clerici contributed heavily to the definition of a new Olivetti style, which is best
reflected in the collection Una campagna pubblicitaria. Produced by Nivola and
Pintori under Sinisgalli’s direction and published in 1939, the volume comprises six-
teen posters for the Studio 42, introduced by a text by Elio Vittorini. In contrast with

25
Here as well, there is disagreement over the attribution of the images. M. Siracusa (“Campagna
pubblicitaria,” in De Giorgi and Morteo (2008, 64)) indicates only Pintori as the author of the work.
12 G. Altea

Fig. 8. Nivola, Pintori, Olivetti Studio 44, 1938. Plate.

the noise and aggressiveness of American advertising, Vittorini’s introduction claims

full aesthetic autonomy and a human dimension for advertising. Without declining to
affirm or abdicating its tie to the product, he wrote, ‘it needs to have another reason for
existence, that makes it exist in and of itself before man. And this reason can only be
the one for which works of art exist: the reason of no reason.”26
The collection has been described as a kind of epitome of the “constant features of
the Olivetti visual code,”27 but beyond the consolidation of a company iconography,
what is striking is the rarefaction of its communicative style. With the exception of the
first poster, which shows a machine just taken out of its packaging and sitting on a
wooden floor, all of the others lack a setting. The images float in a void or rest on
abstract planes, distinguished as such by the evocation of graph paper or the slender
lines of a technical drawing. Even when the “setting” is the theme of the poster, it is
merely hinted at, like the quick, faint sketch of a Baroque lamp or the empty skeleton of
a Rationalist chair. The typewriter is paired with natural elements (flowers, butterflies,
female hands) and artificial ones (mechanical parts, architectural models, geometric
shapes) to disorienting effect. Sometimes it disappears entirely, the keyboard a
synecdoche for its presence (Figs. 9 and 10).

26
Vittorini (1939).
27
Fiorentino (2014, 73).
 A Mythological Hand with 45 Fingers 13

Fig. 9. Plates from Nivola, Pintori, Sinisgalli, Una campagna pubblicitaria, 1939.

Fig. 10. Plates from Nivola, Pintori, Sinisgalli, Una campagna pubblicitaria, 1939.

The echo of Sinisgalli’s poetic world can be felt in the technological imaginary and
suspended atmospheres. And he later laid claim to the office’s creations: “I audaciously
relied … on the seduction of a new language and the refinement of a series of slightly
enigmatic images, calling upon the reader, the user, to participate in a kind of smart
symposium, parade, or contest. Working with a group of students from the Monza
school (Nivola, Pintori, Guzzi, Algarotti), we succeeded in creating … such a jumble of
graphic, sculptural, and pictorial monads, matrices, cells, and molecules that it out-
classed everything that was being done of that kind in Italy at the time.”28 And he
continued: “My work progressed uninterrupted until war broke out. Our studio was
filled with a non-stop flowering of images, models, and devices … the daemon of

28
Sinisgalli (1955).
14 G. Altea

analogy was a daily inspiration. My boys were astoundingly talented, in the blink of an
eye they could create whatever fantasy, the most unexpected pairings of objects,
shapes, colors, type.” Sinisgalli’s paternalistic tone (“my boys”) marks the distance
between the intellectual authority of the creative director and the mere manual “skill” of
the graphic designers, confined to their subordinate role as executors. It also leads one
to suspect that, beyond the climate of openness and embrace of interdisciplinary
exchange at Olivetti, the hierarchy of the arts was still in full force. For that matter, his
“boys” seem to have resented his attitude, judging from the following comment made
by Nivola years later: “The office became bureaucratic and formal under Sinisgalli. As
a freelancer, I found myself vulnerable and on shaky ground.”29.
In reality, it is difficult to believe that (at least) Nivola and Pintori were limited to
putting the poet’s brilliant ideas into practice. After all, the repertoire of mechanical
elements, architecture and Rationalist furniture deployed in Una campagna pubblici-
taria bears the mark of Pintori, while the incongruous pairings and metaphysical and
Surrealist atmospheres in many of the images had already made an appearance in
Nivola’s previous work (that for the 1936 Triennale, for example). This is easily
confirmed by the development of their careers after Sinisgalli’s departure in 1940,
Pintori at Olivetti and Nivola in New York as the art director of Interiors and other
magazines. When the first season of the Olivetti Advertising Office closed with Sin-
isgalli’s call to arms in 1940, the seeds of that experience continued to bear fruit in their
work.

Acknowledgements. All the images are courtesy of Archivio Storico Olivetti, except for the
Fig. 4 that is courtesy of Fondazione Nivola.

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Nivola (1988, 32). The artist was more explicit elsewhere: “I was the one who got Sinisgalli in at
Olivetti, and then the bastard didn’t give me anything to do …,” Baggiani and Pinna Parpaglia
(1980).
 A Mythological Hand with 45 Fingers 15

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Mulino, Bologna (2014)
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Modiano, G. (1935 [but 1936]). Tipografie di Edoardo Persico, Campografico, pp. 11–12: 231–32
Monguzzi, B.: Lo Studio Boggeri. 1933–1981. Electa, Milan (1981)
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Sinisgalli, L.: Le mie stagioni milanesi. Civiltà delle macchine 5, 23 (1955)
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