99 highest response to the human need for beauty. We owe to Olivetti the restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper in the Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, which took seventeen years of engagement. As we owe to Olivetti, among others, the restoration of the Brancacci Chapel and of the Crucifix by Cimabue in Florence, of the Horses of San Marco in Venice, of the Chamber of the Spouses by Mantegna in Mantua, of more than seventy frescoes, from Giotto to Pontormo, detached and restored after the Florence flood in 1966, then made circuiting to the greatest museums in the world. Olivetti has been the first company to connect some parallel initiatives of corporate communication to art. Since the early 1950s, under the promoting and mecenatist thrust of Adriano, even objects used as gifts to be given to prominent customers, suppliers or partners, reflected the artistic and cultural commitment of the company, through the creation of ad hoc art products. In the beginning were the calendars, first of which in 1951, after the selection and refined layout by Giovanni Pintori on a series of artworks by Henri Rousseau; from that moment on, the Olivetti calendars acquired growing credit in the art world and became real collections of wide-ranging artworks, whose circulation reached more than one hundred thousand copies distributed, each year consecrated to an artist or to a prominent artwork – from Pompeian frescoes to Raphael, from Van Eyck to Vermeer, from the paintings of the Japanese Nanban school to new panels by Georges Braque, to Egon Schiele, always accompanied by Renzo Zorzi’s critical notes. From 1960 on, the production of a series of original design cadeaux was initiated, such as letter openers or pencil holders, often produced within the company itself and, in most cases, designed by Nizzoli and Pintori, perfect compendiums of industrial design of which Olivetti was a pioneer. Then came the agendas, designed by Enzo Mari, enclosing each year works by emerging artists starting with Jean-Michel Folon, or renowned ones such as Balthus, Alberto Giacometti, Graham Sutherland. Riding the same wave, in 1972, Renzo Zorzi entrusted the management of Giorgio Soavi with the project of publishing a series of great literary works, using the formula of diaries, with illustration panels specially created by contemporary artists. Thus, the Olivetti strenna books were born, a succession of collectible copies until 2005, such as The Adventures of Pinoke with illustrations by Roland Topor, Death in Venice and Rosario Morra’s artworks, The Tartar Steppe illustrated by Enrico Baj, Natale in Casa Cupiello with photographs by Mario Carrieri, Bel Ami portrayed by Carlo Cattaneo, Petersburg Tales for the sketches by Milton Glaser. A prestigious art collection, combining the artworks commissioned to furnish the Olivetti venues with those purchased during the organization of the numerous exhibitions produced by the company, brought together Guttuso and Kandinskij, Nivola and Klee, Giacometti, Morandi and Sutherland, the Critofilms by Ragghianti and the short film Kyoto by Kon Ichikawa. Landscapes, still life, abstract figurations and photographic works, even today protagonists of exhibitions linked to the avant-garde name of Olivetti: among them, Looking forward. Olivetti: 110 years of image, at the GNAM – Galleria Nazionale dell’Arte Moderna, in Rome, in 2018; Gianni Berengo Gardin e la Olivetti, closed on November 15, 2020, in the Turin spaces of Camera - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia. But, regarding the commitment to promote and spread art as the best communication of the Olivetti spirit, there was more. The company did not limit itself to organizing art exhibitions, as Adriano was proud to say, but it was able to set up what the great art critic Lea Vergine defined as the last avantgarde of contemporary art in Italy: the artistic current of Programmed Art. An avant-garde entrepreneur the likes of Adriano Olivetti can feel in his time, but he can also see into the future. In Italy, in that Piedmont home of Adriano and of a massive working class, Germano Celant – already belonging to the Visual Poetry group together with other artists such as Ketty La Rocca and Nanni Balestrini – baptized Arte Povera a poetic returning to the fundamental human themes, living in a place, living a body, recovering matter, working on raw materials offered both by nature and industry: Jannis Kounellis' coal and sheet metal, Fabio Mauri's Objets Achetés, the pile of rags at the foot of Venus by Michelangelo Pistoletto, the spirals by Mario Merz assembled starting from the Fibonacci sequence, the Sculpture that eats by Giovanni Anselmo. Europe, especially with Victor Vasarely, Jean Tinguely and Bridget Riley, experienced the optical illusions given by Op Art and Kinetic Art abstraction and dynamism. In America, while MIT was developing the first videogame in history Spacewar! and under the tutelary deity of Marcel Duchamp’s Conceptualism, Fluxus – an artistic movement that firmly believed in the power of the interdisciplinarity of the arts, in their continuous flow one in other, whose leading exponents were Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Nam June Paik and Merce Cunningham – was detonating. Simultaneously, in a period of enormous artistic ferment, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Frank Stella’s Minimal Art, carrying on the abstract theses of Pollock and Rothko, was banishing any emphasis to focus on the direct impact of pure form, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg's NewDada transformed assemblages of heterogeneous elements recovered from everyday life and industrial waste, from Coca-Cola bottles to stove pipes, into works of art, paving the way for that worldwide
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