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Lisa Ponti’s career started with her work for popular and influential design magazine Stile (1941-1947) and then as editor-in-chief (1948-1966) and deputy director (1966-1986) of the architectural magazine Domus, where she was responsible for the magazine’s art pages through the critical postwar period. The magazine was very influential at the time and was distinguished among others for maintaining an intense collaboration with artists, allotting features and interviews to many prominent figures from Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Ettore Sottsass and Christo through to Robert Wilson, Tony Cragg, Arakawa & Gins, and Basquiat.

While working for both of these magazines, which were established by her father, internationally renowned architect Gio Ponti, she substantially contributed to shaping a vivid art and culture scene in postwar Italy. Lisa Ponti was always at the forefront of her father’s creative activity and connections. He always encouraged her artistic endeavors and they regularly collaborated throughout her career. Perhaps one of the artist’s greatest legacies, has always been the important and deep relationships that she cultivated and maintained in her life with many artists and intellectuals that she bonded with over their intense and sincere passion concerning art.

Despite drawing for almost all of her life for others, Lisa Ponti was 70 years old when she first showed her work publicly as an artist, with a solo exhibition in 1992. Throughout her artistic career her style and the manner in which she approaches art has remained succinctly consistent. Her most preferred and never changing medium has always been the “utilitarian”, world standard A4 paper: "It's a universal format, so the drawing knows where to land. A4 is putting yourself in the limits that entice you. Inside the standard, the minimum reduces the immense to the distance between the marks."

These dainty lines and strokes, which are at the core of her artistic expression, carry through them a sense of whimsicality, spontaneity and purity that the artist let unfold. Despite that, she never strays away from approaching diverse, sometimes melancholic topics through her drawings. It is exactly this apparent and seemingly simplistic, almost childlike, nature of her “artless” compositions that makes them so intriguing and captivating. It’s her innate ability to aim for the portrayal of complex feelings and emotions through the simplest of imagery. Each brushstroke, pen, pencil or marker line carries a profound intentionality, imbuing her work with a calm and meditative sense of clarity, that glows beyond the edges of the paper.

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Dear Lisa,

acrobats teach us that everything is imaginable

and possible, beyond limits, but with gladness, strength,

courage, and youth, imagination, goodness.

Your Father,

June 1973

Matteo has an important collection of his mom’s drawings, all strictly A4, including one of a circle: “She traced it freehand in a moment,” he tells me, “but if you superimpose a compass on it, you can verify its perfection.”

This is to say of how Lisa’s drawings are yes slight, lyrical, evocative of dreams, generating enchantment to the point of bordering on the sublime, but they are also technically perfect and executively flawless.

Although she held the first exhibition of her drawings when she was already in her seventies, drawing has always been her true passion. She wrote about it in an interview with her friend Franco Toselli,who was also her first art dealer:

“My drawings save me, they appear to me in my sleep and when I wake up the pencil takes my hand and I follow it confidently toward a beneficial destination, a constellation, a trip to Abano Terme. Of art I recognize the tools, like the artisans: the paper, the pencil, the sharpener, the color, the table, the rainbow... I do not use the eraser that brakes the pencil, my drawing is a homemade hero. St. George reads the newspaper, the dragon is in the kennel, the bear plays the violin, if the pencil alters it is only because of a duel between drawing and watercolor; my drawing does not evolve, it is like the grass on a golf course. In art, the protection of childhood reaches late in life, while experiencing the extra time.”

Asked one day why she only ever uses A4 for her drawings, Lisa replied, “It is a universal format, so the drawing knows where to land. A4 is putting yourself in the limits that tempt you; it’s an industrial system, a standard size that all over the world will never be lacking. I have stacks of them here. I set myself this method and I don’t even get the curiosity to try it on a wider sheet: within the standard the minimum reduces the immense to distance between marks.”

Like her father, Lisa was also a collector of the works of the artists she loved, many of whom were her friends, and they, in turn, appreciated her talent as a journalist and draftsman. If one were to make a list of them, you would understand the richness of the world that gravitated around the Ponti household, so representative of the cultural vibrancy of mid-twentieth-century Milan.

In this regard, here is a statement by Lisa taken from an interview with Elena Pontiggia who asked her why she would want to name the exhibition her city was dedicating to her “Grazie” [Thank you]:

“The moon mirrors the sun and thanks it. Because the moon when it’s hit by a strong light becomes bright. ...I was born in a place populated by beautiful suns, and I was struck by their light. I mirrored the artists I met.”

And on her ability to draw, this is what Franco Toselli wrote: “Lisa is a rare example of a natural predisposition for drawing, this allows her not to progress, as is the case with the blackbird in the garden. The same song in all ages. She started drawing in the 1930s and 1940s in the pot-bellied style of the time, after which she allowed herself to regress in order to invent the actual Lisa Ponti drawings. An endless phone call with the Grimm sisters and the hard-core finally smiles, the dragon falls asleep. Lisa ferries dreams into full light. The pencil runs, or rather spins. Lisa’s talent comes from slumber, from the ability to sleep even during the day. Her drawings have the enthusiasm and the joy of the awakening. My job is to supervise Lisa’s pencils: my legs are shaking.”

I would like to conclude this brief tribute to Lisa Ponti’s “pencil” with a thought by Jean Cocteau that fits perfectly her light-heartedness:

“Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.”

And then they go to rest on the sail that her father Gio built in Taranto’s co-cathedral, resembling a lace embroidered on the sky, precisely “for the angels to take a pause.” And father and daughter sit there with them, in light and poetry. Forever.

Maria Luisa Ghianda

artworks

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Lisa Ponti’s career started with her work for popular and influential design magazine Stile (1941-1947) and then as editor-in-chief (1948-1966) and deputy director (1966-1986) of the architectural magazine Domus, where she was responsible for the magazine’s art pages through the critical postwar period. The magazine was very influential at the time and was distinguished among others for maintaining an intense collaboration with artists, allotting features and interviews to many prominent figures from Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Ettore Sottsass and Christo through to Robert Wilson, Tony Cragg, Arakawa & Gins, and Basquiat.

While working for both of these magazines, which were established by her father, internationally renowned architect Gio Ponti, she substantially contributed to shaping a vivid art and culture scene in postwar Italy. Lisa Ponti was always at the forefront of her father’s creative activity and connections. He always encouraged her artistic endeavors and they regularly collaborated throughout her career. Perhaps one of the artist’s greatest legacies, has always been the important and deep relationships that she cultivated and maintained in her life with many artists and intellectuals that she bonded with over their intense and sincere passion concerning art.

Despite drawing for almost all of her life for others, Lisa Ponti was 70 years old when she first showed her work publicly as an artist, with a solo exhibition in 1992. Throughout her artistic career her style and the manner in which she approaches art has remained succinctly consistent. Her most preferred and never changing medium has always been the “utilitarian”, world standard A4 paper: "It's a universal format, so the drawing knows where to land. A4 is putting yourself in the limits that entice you. Inside the standard, the minimum reduces the immense to the distance between the marks."

These dainty lines and strokes, which are at the core of her artistic expression, carry through them a sense of whimsicality, spontaneity and purity that the artist let unfold. Despite that, she never strays away from approaching diverse, sometimes melancholic topics through her drawings. It is exactly this apparent and seemingly simplistic, almost childlike, nature of her “artless” compositions that makes them so intriguing and captivating. It’s her innate ability to aim for the portrayal of complex feelings and emotions through the simplest of imagery. Each brushstroke, pen, pencil or marker line carries a profound intentionality, imbuing her work with a calm and meditative sense of clarity, that glows beyond the edges of the paper.

artworks