Pad (Jun 2020)
Rosa Menni Giolli and the Passion for Batik Middle and Far Eastern Influences between the Two Wars
Abstract
This paper aims to focusing on the protodesigner Rosa Menni Giolli and her pas- sion for batik. She is chosen as an example of emancipation and female vitality among several Italian “thread designers” (Papini, 1923) during the third and fourth decade of the twentieth century. She also exemplifies the effects of fascination for Middle and Far East in Italy during the time among the two world wars (’20 and ’30). On the trade, exhibitions and Mediterranean exchanges were easy to find stimuli for Italian textiles in renewing decorative forms, patters, and special makings influenced by distant cultures. Often these external inspirations depend from nationals’ political cultures and colonial exchanges as well from the need of defense artisanal processes against the increasing predominance of industrial ones. In the batik method Rosa Menni found an old Oriental technique that gave her the opportunity to renew her repertoire by combining her artistic inclination with craft, her love for woodcut and precious material such as silk, the experi- mentation with patters such as colors. She had a large artistic background that gave her strong stimuli: the oriental ones in a different way than they did for artists and designers during Art Nouveau period, for her they became a grammatical repertory for a new process of “stylization by synthesis” (Papini, 1923) that char- acterized 20s Italian style from art to design. The case of Rosa Menni is also and example for mixing artistic and crafts technicians and a woman of early eman- cipation. She successfully opened in 1921 her enterprise named Le Stoffe della Rosa and was the head of her-made laboratory which employed several workers.
