There is a question that Celestino Piatti has been asked many times. How did he come up with the owl as one of his main motives? Once, in Basel, he studied his counterpart for a long time and replied: “You know, I can very well imagine you as an owl.”
At a distance without being hurtful; to create the beautiful without hiding the ugly; Illustrating the present in a playful way, without forgetting its cruelty: this is how, perhaps and if that is possible at all, the mighty work of the illustrator Celestino Piatti (1922-2007) could be summed up. He would have been 100 years old on January 5th, a very legitimate reason for his regular German publisher dtv to publish an illustrated book, oh what an illustrated book, a homage, a declaration of love to an important artist.
Celestino Piatti came from a relatively modest background; he was born in 1922 in Wangen, Switzerland, the son of a farmer and a stone cutter. Artistically gifted, he learned graphics and design in a country that resembled an island of the blessed, while the shadow of Hitler’s Germany fell over Europe and almost all of Europe soon fell under German servitude. The cheerful, enigmatic, life-affirming that shaped his huge oeuvre sometimes seems like a vision of where Europe could have developed without fascism, world war and Holocaust.
As early as 1948 Piatti was a very well-known poster painter in Switzerland, he created the advertising posters for the successful discount campaign of the Basel consumer society “Hamsters is fun”, namely happy golden hamsters (in devastated Germany across the border, “hamsters” were seen as an attempt to somehow to get food, but that didn’t bother the Swiss). In the Federal Republic of Germany, Celestino Piatti was known in later years mainly from the German paperback publishing house. For more than 30 years he drew and painted almost every cover picture for dtv. Its paperbacks were something of a small cultural revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, they went through Heinrich Böll, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Mann, Stanislaw Lem, Sarah Kirsch, Isaac B. Singer and so many others affordable for almost everyone and as if by the way Piatti for aesthetic pleasure. If you will, he gave powerful images of German democratization. This also fits in with the typographic design of an edition of the German Basic Law in plain but solid letters without ornaments or frills, designed by Piatti – it thus meets the spirit and character of this best German constitution.
Celestino Piatti would have turned 100 on January 5th, an occasion for his regular German publisher dtv to publish an illustrated book.
Image: © Celestino Piatti
For more than 30 years he drew and painted almost every cover picture for dtv.
Image: © Celestino Piatti
Heinrich Böll, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Mann, Stanislaw Lem, Sarah Kirsch and so many others made his covers an aesthetic pleasure.
Image: © Celestino Piatti
The design of an edition of the German Basic Law designed by Piatti in simple but solid letters without ornamentation or flourishes.
Image: © Celestino Piatti
In 1992 Piatti remarked: “You can draw the owl a thousand times, you can’t get to its secret.”
Image: © Celestino Piatti
The beautiful illustrated book for the 100th birthday is titled according to Piatti’s motto: “Everything I paint has eyes.”
Image: © Celestino Piatti
The young man in the colorful striped T-shirt, playing guitar alone on some stairs, could be seen in thousands of German student flat shares from the 60s and 70s: The cover of Heinrich Böll’s “Views of a Clown” said almost as much as that Novel about post-war society itself. At least it was the perfect illustration. About the cover picture of Heinrich Mann’s classic “Der Untertan”, on which the German Duckmouse bows deeply in front of a dominant equestrian figure, the graphic artist and author Christoph Niemann says in the illustrated book: “Only later, when we had read the book at school, I noticed how ingenious the design concept actually is: to put the title hero on its side and leave almost the entire sheet to the object of its submissiveness is simply brilliant. “
His publisher and at the same time good friend Heinz Friedrich wrote to him in retrospect in 1991: “I miss our productive conversations very much. No ‘dispositions’ were made here, instead creative ignitions occurred here: It was about art, not about ‘furnishings’. And that The audience took part in this artistic process, it applauded it – for thirty years. The three decades, dear Celestino Piatti, have enriched my life, my creative life experience. These three decades have become part of my own existence. This part will and will I preserve myself – as a lasting memory. “
Whenever it seemed worthwhile to him, he liked to put his art at the service of politics
The beautiful illustrated book for the 100th birthday is titled according to Piatti’s motto: “Everything I paint has eyes.” Here not only the artist, but also the person Piatti becomes tangible, especially in the wonderful portrait that his daughter Barbara Piatti dedicates to him: “I am often asked: The man has worked so incredibly hard – have you ever done him at all Oh yes, we did. Even more: My sister Celestina and I were lucky to have a very present father. There was no separation between work and family life, not even spatially, everything was in one house, in several We lived upstairs, Celestino worked downstairs, the door to his studio was always open, we were never sent away playing in the garage entrance or mending and cleaning our bikes. He just kept working on his assignments at night. “
The mysterious owl was Celestino Piatti’s favorite animal.
Image: © Celestino Piatti
In his studio he put them on covers, posters, lamps.
Image: © Celestino Piatti
Celestino Piatti at work.
Image: © Celestino Piatti
The great illustrator would have turned 100 on January 5th.
Image: © Celestino Piatti
Piatti was a relaxed, personable person. Heinz Friedrich described him as a man “who appeared peasant in form and behavior. He did not make the impression of an artist, and he did not even try to create this impression.” And yet it was of course he, an artist of bright colors, of diversity, someone who was tempted to reassemble and interpret beautiful things so that it would be even more beautiful or just as beautiful in a new way.
But that doesn’t mean he was apolitical. Politics, understood in the liberal sense as the struggle for social progress, has more than touched on his work, and when it seemed worthwhile to him, he gladly put his art at its service. For example in 1966: “We Basler are chivalrous and we vote for our women”, plus a man’s face peeking out of a helmet with an upturned visor, a rose between his teeth.
He designed some of his most beautiful motifs for cigarette companies
He would probably be bullied for this old-fashioned attitude on Twitter today, but at that time the post-ironic age, whose penitential preachers capture as much content as an owl captures its reflection in Piatti’s work, had not yet begun. Because nothing but cheerful irony expresses this picture, not the radicalism of maximum ethics, but a friendly appeal to the people of Basel to reflect on their old liberal virtues and to cast their votes in favor of women’s suffrage in the referendum. The canton had actually not known that until then – and the supporters won, thanks in part to Piatti’s posters that were hanging in many places in Basel.
If you consider in the light of 2021 how little German election posters have changed in their phenomenal narrow-mindedness in decades, then you really understand how great and thrilling Piatti’s art was even back then, more than 60 years ago. He himself once said: “There is hardly any other artistic means of expression that finds a form of protest for political conditions as quickly as the poster.” In the same way, Celestino Piatti painted and drew against xenophobia (“We need these people and they need us”) and nuclear power plants and in 1968 for the Prague Spring.
Piatti also painted for cigarette companies and illustrated advertising campaigns.
Image: © Celestino Piatti
And yet he was always political in his art, as here when he campaigned for the introduction of women’s suffrage in Switzerland.
Image: © Celestino Piatti
Piatti said: “There is hardly any other artistic means of expression that finds a form of protest for political conditions as quickly as the poster.”
Image: © Celestino Piatti
In the militarily most successful epoch of Switzerland, the late Middle Ages, their fighters, armed with halberds, a terrible hybrid of battle ax and spear, were the most feared infantrymen in Europe. They pushed and levered knights from their horses, broke through enemy ranks, they had fought for the freedom of the Swiss Confederates from the superior strength of the Habsburgs and were henceforth sought-after mercenaries in the service of various kings, princes and warlords. It is typical for Piatti that he chose a stylized halberd, of course with eyes, as the symbol of the Swiss prize “Strength of Civil Courage”, as if to say: Remember the beginnings. Remember how bravery can grow from bravery and brutality from ideals.
Today it would of course be offensive that he designed some of his most beautiful motifs for cigarette companies: knights, lions, Dionysus while puffing with pleasure. But what about the owl, the Swiss artist’s favorite motif? Piatti, as he explained, was fascinated by the animal’s large eyes, which seem to capture everything. Of course, in 1992 Piatti remarked: “You can draw the owl a thousand times, you can’t get at its secret.”
Celestino Piatti: Everything I paint has eyes. dtv Munich / Christoph Merian Verlag Basel. Edited by Barbara Piatti and Claudio Miozzari. 405 pages, 59 euros.
On January 22nd, 2022, the Munich literary house is celebrating a “Piatti Day”.