Gianni Sassi was the Frankenstein of Italian design: a volcanic creative and provocateur who, for over 30 years from the ‘60s to the ‘90s, subverted Italian culture spanning across music, graphic design, advertising, publishing, poetry and even food.  

The very figure of Frankenstein, the name he also gave to the technology and poetry magazine he founded in 1972, encapsulated Sassi’s vision. Born in Varese in September 1938, Sassi sought to break down the compartmentalised nature of culture by establishing unprecedented connections between disciplines. 

Frankenstein was also the logo of Cramps, the record label Sassi set up in 1971. Initially a platform for the cream of Italian progressive rock – featuring acts such as Area, Arti & Mestieri, Eugenio Finardi, and Alberto Camerini – it later became a platform of situationist provocation with the absurd punk rock of Skiantos and of the all-girl band Kandeggina Gang.  

Even before that, there was Bla Bla, the record label through which Sassi shaped his vision through the up-and-coming Franco Battiato. Two albums, Fetus and Pollution, saw Sassi’s artistic direction come to life in their artworks: disorienting, disturbing, and shamelessly provocative. The first featured a fetus dummy, the second a lemon impaled by a vine. Earthy colours and plastic volumes allowed Sassi to interpret a musical transposition of the aesthetics of Arte Povera, presenting an image of a country as gloomy and violent as the Years of Lead, yet viscerally creative. 

Similar results were achieved with many other seminal record covers, such as Area’s Arbeit Macht Frei, I Giganti’s Terra in bocca (a concept album about the Mafia and the water war in Sicily), Eugenio Finardi’s Diesel, and Camerini’s Cenerentola e il pane quotidiano. But his vision also extended to Cramp’s Nova Musicha series, which included Sassi-curated releases by the likes of John Cage and Demetrio Stratos, and to Tilt by Arti & Mestieri, a love letter from Sassi to Marcel Duchamp. The French surrealist would later continue to inform on many occasions the creative director’s life, also through his friendship and collaboration with Arturo Schwarz, one of the finest authors and critics on the subject of Duchamp.

In Sassi’s vision, playful and childlike elements always concealed more complex layers. Take the head of a severed doll featured on the cover of the Osage Tribe’s single Un falco nel cielo, as well as his ad campaigns for Polistil. Today, it would be unthinkable to entrust the communication of a toy company to a demiurge of alternative culture. The advertisements directed by Sassi were bona fide works of art: harmonious and sculptural, yet equally sinister. Occasionally, they saw as their model Paola Pitagora, the prominent female face of the new, angry Italian cinema of the ‘60s (as seen in Marco Bellocchio’s I pugni in tasca) and Sassi’s muse. 

Sassi loved infiltrating the world of advertising and corporate culture with his situationist genius. Take his work with furniture firm C&B, when Cassina and Busnelli were still making sofas together. He sat experimental pop star Franco Battiato on a sofa and painted his face white – half glam rock star, half alien. “What is there to look at? Haven’t you ever seen a sofa?” said the tagline, as Sassi playfully challenged the moral altars of an Italy that had discovered its industrial power yet remained intimately parochial. He would later echo this approach with the provocations of punk act Skiantos. Like that time in April 1979, at the Bologna Rock festival when the band instead of performing chose to cook spaghetti on stage. Punk is dead, let’s feast on it.  

Food, as culture, is another great love (and intuition) of Sassi, who in 1982 was among the founders of La Gola, a magazine that subverted the concept of gastronomy, laying the foundations for the Slow Food that was to come. The magazine, of which Sassi is art director, often features graphics by Massimo Dolcini from Pesaro on the cover. It was in the Marche region, collaborating (but above all sharing the table) with the ceramist Franco Bucci, that Sassi came up with the idea of creating plates decorated with poems. Like Buon Ricordo plates, but by an artist. 

Before Bucci, there was the association of Sassi and partner Sergio Alberigoni with Iris Ceramica, a company in the historic district between Modena and Reggio Emilia. A relationship, promoted by founder Romano Minozzi, that led in 1973 to the birth of Humus magazine, a visionary point of contact between industrial research and alternative culture. And, above all, to Pollution – For a new aesthetic of pollution, an Iris-powered event he staged in Bologna in 1972 with 26 artists (including Renato Mambro, Mario Ceroli, Franco Battiato, UFO, and Ugo La Pietra) whom he challenged to imagine “ways to manage a mutating nature.” This was a sensibility far removed from the greenwashing of today’s multinationals—a manifesto from a time when top executives in double-breasted suits were happy to invest in beauty and leave the graphic identity of their companies in the hands of long-haired, dissenting youths. Imagine, today, Gianni Sassi in an era of commercial communication dominated by WhatsApp emojis and AI-generated graphics. 

Sitting in a perpetual limbo between industry and alternative culture, Sassi managed to upend conventions and hierarchies like few other Italian creatives. His vision and verve struck at the heart of Milan’s artistic and cultural life through initiatives such as Milano Poesia and the Mudima, which hosted performances by many artists associated with Fluxus (notably John Cage, Yoko Ono, and Beuys).  

It is precisely this aspect of Sassi that is celebrated in Gianni Sassi. Gioia e Rivoluzione, an exhibition at the ADI Design Museum in Milan, which brings together archival materials and multimedia elements in an effort to show how, starting from graphic design, Sassi contributed to revolutionising Italian culture.  

Numerous are the highlights: the original and provocative artwork “Dipingi di giallo il tuo poliziotto” (Paint your cop yellow) used for the cover of Bit magazine – of which Sassi was art director during the beatnik ferment –, as well as posters and original editions of his magazines La Gola and Alfabeta. A wall of VHS tapes featuring performances by Fluxus artists Sassi curated for Mudima, and many photographs ranging from intimate shots with friends at Milan’s historic Lucky Bar to images with John Cage. Despite the exhibition’s pursuit of three-dimensionality – from prepared pianos to projections – Sassi emerges as two-dimensional.  

His experimental, nonconformist aesthetic is ultimately neutralised by an excessively institutional set up and presentation. In the end we’re left with what appears to be a missed opportunity: a chance to remove Sassi’s figure and work from the bubble of nostalgics and former collaborators, and to relaunch his appeal and significance in the eyes of a new audience. Something that, on the contrary, was recently and virtuously achieved with Pino Pascali at Fondazione Prada. 

The need for a more comprehensive retrospective endures, one that not only provides nostalgic comfort but that, most importantly, enables us to learn from Sassi’s genius.

Opening image: Gianni Sassi and John Cage on the "treno sonoro", 1978. Photo Fabio Emilio Simion