The Straw Donkey: What it means in the context of Italian Design.

Written by: Constanza Coscia

Review of Penny Spark’s Article on the Straw Donkey

Penny Spark’s article on Italian design focuses on a confusing yet very interesting part of the “Italy at Work” catalogue that circulated the United States during the early 1950s. As a country that was recovering from having lost the Second World War, and that needed as much help as it could take in its economy, Italy was desperate to find itself economically, socially, and culturally. Here is where the Marshall Plan, something that at plain sight seems purely economical, plays a part in the development of Italian design. The Marshall Plan, explains Spark, can be one of the attributed reasons as to why Italian design developed the way it did.

Spark mentions a “straw donkey” that appears over and over again in her article right at the beginning of her writing. This straw donkey is a representation for artisanal, Italian work and production. This artisanal work, this straw donkey, she mentions, is what Italians could look towards and feel identified with, especially those Italians that had emigrated to the US and were living there- which just so happened to be a big chunk of the market the Italy at Work catalogue was trying to attract. This could be one of the reasons this straw donkey seems to be thrown in the middle of a spectrum that varies from design that is sleek and elegant to that that looks avant-garde and more arts and crafts.

Yet, that is one of the many solutions she presents to the confusion as to why Italian design relentlessly stuck to artisanal production as it was trying to modernize itself. Spark mentions, among many, for example, that the straw donkey could’ve been a way to alleviate the shock of new production and new industries; Italians were not used to rapid industrialization and therefore needed the straw donkey so as the change was not as shocking as it rolled in. The artisanal products could’ve also been there to legitimize Italian rural culture in a period of time that was going through a massive avant-garde explosion (she mentions that the ceramic works of Picasso were extremely popular in Italy and that many copied his style). It could’ve also been history repeating itself, as the Catholic Church had once also put emphasis on artisanal production in the nineteenth century, and Mussolini as well later on in the twentieth century. Except this time, Spark points out, artisanal production is supposed to help continuity and change, instead of holding back and being controlling, as it had been in the previous examples.

Overall, this is a very interesting article that Spark has written. Although at bit long, it does a good job of explaining what Italian design went through from 1945 to 1960. The different explanations as to why artisanal culture thrived and was in use in a period of otherwise intense modernity and mass production are very well explained and thought-through. Who knew that a little straw donkey could provide for such speculation and different theories?