On 31 January 2013 – 80 years after the publication of "Campo Grafico / Rivista di Estetica e Tecnica Grafica” – Gaetano Grizzanti established the ASSOCIAZIONE CAMPO GRAFICO in Milan, together with Mauro Chiabrando and the sons of the founders of the journal: Massimo Dradi and Pablo Rossi.

The journal Campo Grafico: Rivista di Estetica e di Tecnica Grafica (A Journal of Aesthetics and Technical Graphics) was an exceptionally original collective publishing venture, that ran between the two world wars, in the northern Italian city of Milan. In the inter-war period, Milan was at the vanguard of new debates on ‘The Modern’, with several vitally important creative hubs, such as the art gallery ‘Il Milione’ and the café ‘Bar Craja’, which helped to ferment fresh ideas on modern taste in Italy and abroad; holding discussions on topics ranging from the fate of architecture to new typography, and hosting exhibitions on abstract painting. It was in this creative climate that the revolutionary journal, Campo Grafico, was launched in 1933, by the artists Attilio Rossi and Carlo Dradi.

Campo Grafico immediately became an ideal aggregation point for similarly-minded independent, free spirits, many of whom had hitherto worked in complete obscurity. Whatever their training, technical and/or artistic, they were open minds responding to the provocative intellectual stimulus that had characterized the European avant-gardes in the previous decade.

Although launched in 1933, the Campo Grafico adventure actually began in 1932, in a tavern in ‘via delle Asole’, a small street not far from Milan’s imposing gothic cathedral, where the core group of the journal’s founding writers and artists met periodically. They knew that there was a dire need to rejuvenate the graphic arts: from a technical point of view, they wanted to combine typographical quality with the great strides made in photography; at the aesthetic level, it was necessary to overcome the constricting, inadequate limits of neoclassical symmetry and typography as art; lastly, culturally, they knew that such innovation could only come about from the cross-fertilization of typography, rationalist architecture, and the european artistic avant-garde.

Finally, the arguments of the new graphic aesthetics that Guido Modiano and Edoardo Persico had anticipated, between 1931 and 1932, in the magazine Tipografia, could be further discussed, such as the identity and the role of the new professional figure of ‘graphic designer’, which necessarily meant a thorough transformation of teaching programmes in professional schools.

Campo Grafico’s supporters also lent their support to friends in cognate areas, such as painters, scenographers, sculptors, and architects, since the journal’s constitution dictated that there should be no distinction between manual labour and intellectual work, nor class barriers – all artistic, human, and political values were to be equally considered with seriousness, a critical spirit, and adherence to truth, that normally occurs only after a political and social revolution.

Only recently, by bringing together various texts, memories, and other data, has it been possible to reconstruct what was the actual overall circulation of the magazine: namely, 500 copies per issue, sold via subscription, to supporters and printers.