Ugo Mulas - photographer

Images of street life in Milan and of New York art scene won acclaim

Ugo Mulas began his photography
career in Milan in the 1950s

The photographer Ugo Mulas, much admired for the way he captured the street atmosphere of postwar Milan and for his portraits of Andy Warhol and others in the Bohemian New York art scene of the 1960s, was born on this day in 1928 in Pozzolengo, a small town near the southern tip of Lake Garda.

At one time part of Milan’s fashion community, another of Mulas’s claims to fame is having been the photographer who discovered Veruschka, a German aristocrat who became part of the supermodel generation of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton in the 60s. 

Known for his meticulous approach to composition and lighting, and for the candid, spontaneous style of his work, illness denied Mulas a long life but he is widely seen as a pioneering figure in photography who had a profound impact on the art form.

Little is known about Mulas’s early life other than that he studied at a classical lyceum and moved to Milan initially to study law, but then switched his focus to art, enrolling at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera.

He was drawn towards the company of the artists and intellectuals who frequented the nearby Bar Jamaica. 

A fashionable hang-out at different times for artists such as Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana, writers Allen Ginsberg and Salvatore Quasimodo, designers Achille Castiglioni and Ettore Sottsass and actors Dario Fo and Mariangela Melato, it was the Jamaica and its clientele that sparked Mulas to begin taking photographs.

Armed with a compact Leica camera, Mulas developed an eye for pictures that captured the essence of everyday life. In the Brera and beyond, around Milano Centrale station, where people from all walks of life paused in the waiting rooms, and in other locations, he created a visual record of life in a city at the forefront of Italy’s postwar recovery in the early 1950s.

Mulas first gave notice of his photographic talent
with his street scenes in postwar Milan 

He became a regular at the Jamaica, where in addition to taking photographs he made numerous contacts in the fashion industry and the media, which led to his first paid assignment in 1954, when he was invited by the Venice Biennale to cover the exhibition as its official photographer. It was a relationship that would continue until 1972.

The following year he opened his own studio in Milan and his work would soon be illustrating the pages of publications such as Settimo Giorno, Rivista Pirelli, Domus and Vogue, as well as supporting advertising campaigns for clients including Pirelli and Olivetti.

Away from fashion, art and architecture, Mulas still enjoyed taking his camera on to the streets to photograph Italians in their day-to-day life. It was while he was shooting street scenes in Florence, in 1959, that his eyes were drawn towards a woman whose 6ft 3ins frame would make her stand out in any crowd.

This was Veruschka von Lehndorff, a German aristocrat whose father, a member of the German resistance movement in World War Two, had been executed in 1944 for plotting to assassinate Adolf Hitler. She was in Florence in the late 50s to further her study of art.

Mulas’s striking images of her long-limbed elegance found their way to the desk of Diana Vreeland, editor of the US edition of Vogue. It was the start of a modelling career that would see Veruschka paid $10,000 for a single day’s shooting at her peak.

Among the projects for which Mulas won particular acclaim were his 1964 series on the Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana, his reportage on the Sculture nelle città exhibition in Spoleto in 1962 and the series devoted to Ossi di sepia, the collection of poems by Eugenio Montale.

Mulas came into contact with the American art scene at the 1964 Venice Biennale, where his encounters with a number of American artists, art critics, and the art dealer Leo Castelli led him to travel to New York City.

Andy Warhol (right), with the American poet Gerard
Malanga, photographed by Ugo Mulas in New York

The New York art scene in the 1960s was a vibrant and transformative period, marked by a variety of groundbreaking movements and innovative artists.  Mulas was drawn in particular to the Bohemian atmosphere of the Pop Art scene. He won the trust of artists such as Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein and installed himself as a fly on the wall within the studios of six artists he would follow closely over three visits: those of Johns, Lichtenstein, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman, and Robert Rauschenberg. 

His collection of more than 100 photographs from this period became the subject of an exhibition and a book. 

From the late 1960s, Mulas began working in theatre, contributing to the stage design for many  productions at Milan's Piccola Scala theatre and the Teatro Comunale di Bologna.

As a photographer, Mulan would continually experiment, always pursuing new ideas for composition, plot and framing. Some of his contemporaries suggested that through his art he sought to understand the depths of human souls. In the late 1960s, he began work on a new series, entitled La Verifiche - the Verification - that was an attempt to analyse the photographic process and identify its value.

It turned out to be his last work of substance. Diagnosed with cancer in 1970, he continued to work for as long as he had the strength but in March 1973, soon after the release of his last book, La Photographie, in which he recorded all his ideas and observations on art and photography, he died at home in Milan at the age of 45, survived by his wife, Antonia “Nini” Bongiorno.

Before he died, Mulas established the Archivio Ugo Mulas, in Via Giovanni Battista Piranesi in Milan, which houses, manages copyright and sales and promotes the artistic work of Ugo Mulas.

The Castello di Pozzolengo in the historic town
close to Lake Garda dates back to the 10th century

Travel tip:

Pozzolengo, where Mulas was born, is a small town in Lombardy, close to the border with the Veneto region and about halfway between Brescia and Verona. Situated just a few kilometres south of Lake Garda, it is surrounded by low hills lined with vines. Its origins can be traced to the Bronze Age, while Roman relics have also been discovered in the area. It has a mediaeval castle, built in the 10th century at the highest point of Monte Fluno, and a 12th century Benedictine monastery, the Abbazia di San Virgilio, now converted to a golf resort. The town’s vineyards produce the Lugana DOC wine, while other local products include saffron and a salami called salame morenico di Pozzolengo. In the 19th century Pozzolengo was the scene of a number of battles which led to the independence and unification of Italy, in particular, of the Battle of Solferino and San Martino in June 1859. Fought between the Austrian and Franco-Sardinian armies with the participation of over 230,000 soldiers, the battle resulted in a victory for the Franco-Sardinian forces, bringing to an end the Second Italian War of Independence.

The Palazzo Brera in Milan is home to the 
prestigious Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera

Travel tip:

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, sometimes shortened to Accademia di Brera, where Ugo Mulas studied after initially pursuing a law degree, is now a state-run tertiary public academy of fine arts in Via Brera in Milan, in a building it shares with the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan's main public museum for art. The academy was founded in 1776 by Maria Theresa of Austria and shared its premises with other cultural and scientific institutions. The main building, the Palazzo Brera, was built in about 1615 to designs by Francesco Maria Richini.  The Brera district is so named because in around the ninth century, for military purposes, it was turned into a ‘brayda’ – a Lombardic word meaning ‘an area cleared of trees’. For a long time a magnet for artists and writers, the Brera district remains one of Milan’s most fashionable neighbourhoods, its narrow streets lined with trendy bars and restaurants. As the traditional home of many artists and writers, the area has a Bohemian feel that has brought comparisons with Montmartre in Paris.

Also on this day:

1665: The death of painter and printmaker Elisabetta Sirani

1809: The birth of sculptor Giovanni Maria Benzoni

1909: The birth of movie actor Lamberto Maggiorani

1938: The birth of journalist and talk show host Maurizio Costanzo

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