Ugo Mulas

Ugo Mulas is born on August 28, 1928 in Pozzolengo, in the province of Brescia. In 1948 after graduating from a classical lyceum he moves to Milan where he works as a tutor so that he can support himself while studying Law. Between 1951 and 1952 he enrolls in an evening course on nude drawing at Brera Academy and starts spending time at Bar Jamaica, the haunt of intellectuals and artists. After completing his studies he chooses not to get a university degree “because I was afraid I would be forever influenced […] I preferred to risk failing, becoming a misfit, someone without an occupation.”[[1]]

Postwar Milan, the city’s outskirts, Bar Jamaica, and the waiting rooms at the Central Train Station where the homeless find shelter are the locations in Ugo Mulas’s early photos.

Neorealism corresponds to the photographer’s ideological and human position. Nonetheless, these first images capture “the small and significant gestures of photography more than of the setting, they are metaphorical of the act and statute of photography rather than realistic and descriptive.” In 1954 he produces his first official reportage at the Venice Biennale: “My official activity as a photographer began with the 1954 Venice Biennale; at the time, I had neither practice, nor any sort of art. I had left Milan with Mario Dondero for no specific reason except for my desire to approach this world in a more participative way.”[[2]]

In Tommaso Trini’s words: “With his first reportage photography at the 1954 Venice Biennale he immediately identified his preferential relationship with art, which he never neglected in spite of the growing and more profitable success that would also allow him to work in the fields of fashion, advertising, and theater; he established the scene of long periods of time spent in that city; indeed it was in Venice in the summer of 1972 that he took his last photos. He was not so much drawn to the art objects as to the characters, the people, the sense of the event. Mulas was the photojournalist who brought to life the actors and settings of the Biennale, portraying them as though they were on a stage.” [[3]]

In 1955 the pictures he had taken at the Bar Jamaica between 1953 and 1954 are published in the weekly Tutti; it is thanks to this publication that Mulas is asked to contribute regularly to the magazine Settimo Giorno. He opens his first photography studio in Milan. His relationship with the lab and the darkroom will be at the core of his work: Mulas will always personally oversee the printing of his photographs.

In 1958 he meets and eventually marries Antonia ‘Nini’ Bongiorno. Antonia Mulas will be the photographer’s life companion but also the companion of his work and art, creating alongside him a professional studio that will become a reference for a new generation of photographers.

Also in the second half of the 1950s, as his artistic work is unfolding, he starts collaborating with the worlds of industry, advertising, and fashion. From 1955 to 1962, together with Giorgio Zampa, he publishes numerous reportages for L’Illustrazione Italiana, directed by his friend Pietrino Bianchi. Between 1956 and 1957 he begins curating articles about art and architecture for the magazines Rivista Pirelli and Domus; he regularly publishes fashion reportages in the magazines Bellezza and Novità (later Vogue). His encounter with the stylist Mila Schön marks the start of an artistic collaboration that will last for the photographer’s lifetime, and will continue with Antonia Mulas.

In the first fashion reportages “Mulas interweaves his interests, the one in art and a certain Neorealist and ethical sense, and the one in the urban landscape and the social meaning of work, which will lead him to avoid certain habits typical of those circles, fashion and advertising in particular, hence, to avoid glorifying luxury.” [[4]]

In 1960, 1960, on the occasion of a tour in Moscow with the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, Mulas produces an independent reportage; he is witness to a reality that is almost unknown at the time: “Images that want to make us participants in an existential model, in a life of relations, not in the irony of an overseeing judge or in the rhetoric of a participation that is subservient to an ideological level.”.[[5]] For the theater he collaborates on a regular basis with Giorgio Strehler, with whom he publishes the photo-reportage of two Brechtian plays performed at the Piccolo: The Threepenny Opera (1961) and Schweyk in the Second World War (1962). In 1964, for the performance of Life of Galileo, also by Brecht, Mulas and Strehler devise a type of photographic documentation that is inspired by the German playwright’s technique; from now on he will use this style to represent his theatrical works. In 1960 his first two exhibitions are organized, the first of these at the 12th Triennale of Milan, curated by the art historian Lamberto Vitali, the second one at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan.

In 1962 he publishes Invito a Venezia, a monographic text dedicated to the city with an introduction by Peggy Guggenheim; he produces a reportage of the event titled Sculture nella città for the 5th Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. Giovanni Carandente, the curator of the festival, brings together over five hundred sculptors, some of whom create their works in factories made available for the occasion by Italsider Steelworks. Mulas photographs the production phases of the sculptures and their inclusion in the city’s fabric: “Some [of the sculptors] chose very modern factories, ones that were very well equipped; David Smith instead chose an old abandoned factory in Voltri […] he said he had never seen old factories like these, that they no longer existed. Machinery in the early twentieth century still had anthropomorphic shapes. Machines that looked like legs, mouths, as if they belonged to a specific sex; these were already sculptures on their own […] Smith could not have made those sculptures anywhere else; and in fact, he called them Voltri I, Voltri II, etc. etc.” [[6]]

The photographs taken in Voltri would be the focus of the book Voltron, edited by Carandente and published in 1964 by the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania.

In Spoleto Mulas ran into Arnaldo Pomodoro, and he also met Pietro Consagra and Alexander Calder. It was the start of a friendship that would lead to the production of a monograph for each one of them.

In 1962 Mulas also made a series of images dedicated to the poetry collection Ossi di seppia by Eugenio Montale (Cuttlefish Bones, W.W. Norton & Co., New York 1993). “I suggested that a newspaper take pictures to illustrate Montale’s poetry, especially Cuttlefish Bones, poems I had loved when I was a young boy and that I almost knew by heart […]. Illustrating Cuttlefish Bones might seem easy, but it’s also easy to fall into the trap of triviality because some of the poems are so visual any attempt to interpret them figuratively would add nothing to the meaning of the lines, it would only be a repetition. I think the illustration is meant to help the reader to understand the text, help them to read it.”[[7]]

“The sea, without a horizon, becomes absolutely vertical, it seems to descend from the top of the image and move downwards […]. The reversal from horizontality to verticality is strong, almost violent at times, at other times more sophisticated […]. The sea is not the sole protagonist of these landscapes; the rocks, its exact opposite because of their solidity, immobility, their presence, are protagonists here as well. Once again Mulas toys with horizontality and verticality.” [[8]]

In 1963 Antonia and Ugo Mulas’s visit to Saché’s studio-cum-home in France marks the birth of a photography project dedicated to the sculptor Alexander Calder, which will be completed with the publication of a book in 1971. “The setting, the man, the friendship often influenced my work in a crucial way, and Calder was one of the main characters. I wanted to do something wonderful for him, I wanted to take pictures that would express his approach, the playful side of his oeuvre […]. My photos were not supposed to show anything other than a declaration of my love for his work and for the joy that his friendship gave me. A total homage.” [[9]]

In 1964,in the Milanese studio of Lucio Fontana, Mulas made the series of images titled The Waiting: “Of all the pictures I have made, only one series – done in practically half an hour – has a precise meaning. Until that moment I had only photographed him, but now, finally, I wanted to understand what he was doing. Maybe it was the presence of a white canvas, a big one, with only one slash, that he had just finished. That canvas showed me that Fontana’s mental action (that took shape practically in an instant, in the gesture of slashing the canvas) was even more complex, and that the concluding gesture revealed only a part of it.” [[10]]

Mulas’s encounter with Pop art at the 1964 Venice Biennale encourages him to leave for the United States (he would return there in 1965 and in 1967) to produce a reportage on the New York art scene. Germano Celant desribes it as follows:“Mulas travels to New York and expands the horizon of his construction and his interpretation. In addition to interpreting himself, his passion, which is now also clarified through his conversation with the photographer Robert Frank as being a language that is articulated and conscious, he ‘writes’ an exceptional photographic text, which is published in 1967 as New York: The New Art Scene. Aimed at producing the utmost exegesis by images of an entourage that is destined to become a leader in contemporary art, Mulas works on the preliminary meaning of the painting of Jasper Johns, he makes sense out of the chaotic accumulation of John Chamberlain, he philologically reconstructs the sculptural process of George Segal, he interprets the neutral and aseptic nature of Andy Warhol, lastly, he allows for the theatrical manifestation that is typical of the happenings of Claes Oldenburg.

The art of New York and its ‘high priests,’ including the gallerist Leo Castelli and the theorist Alan Solomon, along with the lofts of the collectors and the artists, offer themselves as a series of individualistic phenomena, intersected by professional principles and by the game. To decipher all this, the photographer documents their unknown world and makes it famous. He offers it to the gaze and he gives it clarity. He frees the intimacy of the artists’ secrets and their iconographic sources, he transforms Roy Lichtenstein’s presence into a comic strip, he reveals the obsessive impersonal expression in Frank Stella’s paintings, he communicates Barnett Newman’s love of the void and the minimal.” [10]

[[11]] In 1967, after returning to Italy permanently, he publishes New York: The New Art Scene and presents the exhibition New York: arte e persone at the Galleria Il Diaframma. He publishes a book about Alik Cavaliere, edited by Guido Ballo. He follows the major artistic events: Lo spazio dell’immagine in Foligno, the 1968 protests at the Biennale and the Triennale in Venice and Milan, respectively, Kassel Documenta.

He experiments with new intersections between art and fashion: “Meanwhile, photography has become much more essential, the nearly empty scene, the model, the space, very few elements, black shapes painted on the walls and floor, like shadows, shadow play both real and not real, mirror games.”[[12]][11] For Uomo Vogue Alighiero Boetti, Valerio Adami, Pino Pascali, Paolo Scheggi, Tommaso Trini, Lucio Fontana, Agostino Bonalumi, Ettore Sottsass, Luchino Visconti, among others, pose in his studio; for Mila Schön he creates connections with various artists, including Lucio Fontana, Mario Ceroli, Alexander Calder.

In 1966, together with Guido Le Noci, Mulas edits the republication of Manifiesto blanco by Lucio Fontana.

Between 1967 and 1969 Mulas prints his first large contact sheets, re-readings of his reportages on American artists. The works feature whole photographic sequences made with the individual artists in the mid-1960s: these are large-scale images made by printing film directly from the negative or by enlarging entire strips of negatives.

During these years,“even though he continued to be seduced by the language of art, to the extent that he continued with his reportages for the Venice Biennale, to portray artists as they worked […], or collaborating with them to make books, such as those of Alexander Calder and Pietro Consagra, his search for a ‘certain’ gaze at photography encouraged him to move toward the vital nucleus of the photographic process, where the elements are primary and essential.”[[13]] [12]

In September 1969 he documents Campo Urbano, an event organized in the historic district of Como by Luciano Caramel, which brings together some of the protagonists of the Italian neo-avant-garde. Campo Urbano – Interventi estetici nella dimensione collettiva urbana is the title of the book by Ugo Mulas together with Bruno Munari and Luciano Caramel. In Como he also presents a series of photographic prints mounted on largescale wooden supports of entire photographic sequences of the performances and temporary installations created during the event.

He collaborates with the director Virginio Puecher, making scenery for the opera The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten (Piccola Scala in Milano, 1969) and for Woyzeck by Alban Berg (Teatro Comunale in Bologna, 1969). As concerns The Turn of the Screw, Ugo Mulas has this to say to Arturo Carlo Quintavalle: “When you deal with a theme about ghosts […] you can’t take naturalistic photos. I searched for an old castle in England that had all the necessary scenic ingredients […]. I worked on the photos in the lab, I made negatives that were as faithful as possible to the meaning of the text, and then bestowed an artificial evocation on them, processing them in the darkroom, in the lab… I made prints on paper and then solarized the image just enough to make it ambiguous.”[[14]] [13]

As for Woyzeck Mulas had this to say: “We thought of identifying that point where the city is no longer there, but the countryside is still there, this no man’s land, this borderland where people living in shacks, society’s outcasts come together to live […]. These are images of places where there is waste, where there are towers of metal that bring electricity to the city, the tracks left by the trucks and bulldozers that are digging to make new beltways, devasted areas where there is no street yet, where there are these gigantic footprints […] this limbo.”[[15]] [14]

To create the scenes for Woyzeck, Ugo Mulas returns to the places that he photographed in the first half of the 1960s for his industrial reportages, or for his research into urban landscapes, images that he would later add to his project Un archivio per Milano (1970), conceived as the production of images to be made available to anyone studying the city: “What I would like to photograph in this city is above all what is unknown: that is to say, the interiors, the houses, what can’t be seen or that you don’t want to see, don’t want to show. The public interiors that I’m not familiar with, and also the ones that I know but that I have never looked at carefully […] take pictures of all this without the people; […] I want the protagonist to be a certain load-bearing structure that we call city, a disarticulated structure that brings an anonymous crowd, that changes every day, that passes through it every day, that each day is destined to pass through.”[[16]][15] “This is what makes the project unique, one that is anything but purely realistic, but rather post-conceptual, as one might say today: showing not what you see, but what can’t be seen or that you don’t want to see.”[[17]][16]

In 1970 a serious illness interrupts his activity suddenly, and his project about Milan cannot be produced, “although the few images available to us reveal a harmony with photographic research on the urban landscape that would have been developed in the 1970s and ’80s.”[[18]] [17]

In the fall of 1969 he takes pictures of Arnaldo Pomodoro’s jewelry in Venice: “He chooses a model of color, because she is less academic and conventional in the forms she features […] the choice also leads him to other inevitable references: he is thinking about Black sculpture and its influence on avant-garde art.”[[19]] [18]

In 1970 in the exhibition catalogue for Amore mio (organized in Montepulciano by Achille Bonito Oliva) he publishes a work consisting of six variations on a proof representing the performance Marcia funebre o della geometria, made by Paolo Scheggi in Campo Urbano.

With respect to the proofs concerning the Pop artists, in this work the perspective is reversed: the proof is no longer the tool used to control the photographic process, rather it is the verification of the negative as the condition for the potential of any documentation.”[[20]] [19]

Mulas’s work for Amore mio foreshadows the presentation of Verification 1 – Homage to Niépce that he works on from 1968 to 1970.

That same year in Milan, he documents the events and installations organized by Pierre Restany for the tenth anniversary of the Nouveau Réalisme movement. In Rome he photographs the exhibition Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in whose rooms he takes pictures for Verification 3The Time of Photography. For Jannis Kounellis.. In 1971 at the Galleria dell’Ariete di Milano he shows Verification 1 – Homage to Niépce and the first version of Verification 2 – The Process of Photography. Self-Portrait for Lee Friedlander. That same year he organizes the exhibition Künstler New York 1964. Hommage à Alan Solomon at the Kunsthalle in Basel.

In 1970 he photographs the Arnaldo Pomodoro exhibition Sculture nella città in Pesaro: “The column is a figurative element, and it fits in well with the architectural context, even though Arnaldo uses it as a critical discourse on monumentality per se: I believe that Pomodoro’s title for these broken columns, Movimento di crollo, unquestionably signifies the end of the world, of a monumentalistic civilization.”[[21]][20]

In 1971 he also completes his book on Alexander Calder, Calder, for which he produces the graphic design as well. He publishes the book Lo spazio inquieto about Fausto Melotti’s sculptures, with texts by Italo Calvino, Fausto Melotti, and Paolo Fossati.

During these years Mulas intensifies his critical study of his work, an analysis that he will call Verifications: a group of fourteen works made up of images and texts, aimed at defining the photographic material and its technical, linguistic, and ethical codes.

Celant writes as follows:“Mulas manages to give back to the photogram a hidden life. He causes the fire of an autonomous being to erupt on the sensitive paper, that of a being who had forgotten about himself, devoured by the eye of the other. Thus are born the Verifications, naked and natural photographs that go to the very bottom of the images. This last assemblage, which he had been working on since 1972, seeks to emphasize the gradual disappearance of the Mulas subject in favor of the idea, the concept, the photographic process.”[[22]] [21]

In the early 1970s Mulas begins writing the book La fotografia, edited by Paolo Fossati with the collaboration of Antonia Mulas. The book presents a selection of images introduced by comments in which Mulas provides the essential tools needed to understand his work.

In 1972 together with Pietro Consagra he records the conversation that will accompany Fotografare l’arte: an anthology of images on the sculptor’s work with an introduction by Umberto Eco:“Hence, the dialogue between a Sculptor and his Photographer emerges from their private conversations and becomes a document on ambiguity, difficulty, pain, joy, and the happiness behind making art.”[[23]] [22]

In 1972 he also presents, at the Galleria Multicenter in Milan, the portfolio Marcel Duchamp, and publishes several theoretical reflections that are additions to the Verifications project, “thus paving the way in Italy as well for a season with a new approach between contemporary art and photography.”[[24]] [23]

Between 1971 and 1972 he teaches Photography at the University of Parma where, until the early months of 1973, he organizes, together with his friend and curator Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, a retrospective of his work.

Ugo Mulas passes away on March 2, 1973, in his studio-cum-home in Milan.

On April 21, 1973 La fotografia (Einaudi, Turin) is published.

The following month a retrospective of the artist’s works opens at the Palazzo della Pilotta: Ugo Mulas. Immagini e testi at the Art History Institute of the University of Parma. For the first time ever the complete Verifications series is on display. The images chosen for the catalogue Ugo Mulas.

Immagini e testi, edited by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, are introduced by a long autobiographical interview. In June 1973 the book Fotografare l’arte, produced with Pietro Consagra, is published.

“A refined critic and a sensitive foreshadower of the new aesthetic and conceptual statute of art, Mulas sees photography as the ineluctable realm to investigate the most fruitful developments of the contemporary scene. He was the first Italian photographer to construct a critical strategy of his work: in this sense his work cannot be judged solely for the images, but rather must be seen as a complex project that ultimately ended with the creation of the Verifications and the publication of a simultaneous series of autobiographical and self-critical works. Books like La fotografia, edited by Paolo Fossati, and Fotografare l’arte, written in conversation with Pietro Consagra, are key tools to be able to understand the work of the photographer, artist, and critic.”[[25]] [24]