Moleskine®

Moleskine® was launched in 1997 by a small Milan-based publisher who decided to bring back to life a legendary pad used by artists and thinkers the likes of Van Gogh, Picasso, Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin. These simple notepads – which, over the decades, have contained sketches, notes, and ideas that would evolve into stellar works of art and literature – had essentially disappeared in the late 1980s. Moleskine® chose to pay homage to this tradition with a product (...) Read More

Moleskine® is much more than a simple notepad: it is a brand offering a range of tools made to set creativity free, including agendas, notepads, bags, writing instruments, apps, and accessories.

Every white page of a Moleskine® notepad is a place where ideas can come to life and grow. A space that stretches beyond the product. A meeting point for creative minds. A platform that celebrates originality and lasting thoughts.

The Moleskine Foundation, created to inspire young, creative minds to transform their future and that of their communities, promotes Creativity for Social Change. Through its innovative education initiatives and partnerships with local entities, the Foundation helps develop a proactive and transformative attitude, fostering creativity as, indeed, a tool for change. To support such a mission, the Moleskine Foundation possesses one of the most extensive collections of artists’ notepads: over 1600 works donated by international painters, architects, writers, musicians, and designers. This collection is a living archive of contemporary creativity, which continues to inspire and support social change through expression.

Each pad tells a unique story, a dream, a project, or a personal way of interacting with the world, showing how much a limited space can stimulate inventiveness and creative freedom.

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Highlights

Joana Vasconcelos, Moleskina Contamina, Paris, France, 2011. In the notebook, we can find the artist artworks’ main characters, like the use of the multicolour crochet and the creation of soft and amorphous fabric-made figures, which emerge from the flat surface of the notebook to become space-stretched sculptures. The notebook has been integrated atomically into the primordial forms created by the artist, melting with the elaborate material manipulation to become, at the same time, a structure part and support. Courtesy of the Moleskine® Foundation. Photography by Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.

Pascale Marthine Tayou, Many many (people), Yaoundé, Camerun, 2011. Pascale Marthine Tayou works on the identity contradictions created by globalization and plays on the relationships he maintains with his own identity. His notebook is another testimony of the individual facing the collective, the multiplicity of identities and the search for ways to be together in these difficult times. Courtesy of the Moleskine® Foundation. Photography by Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.

Sara Conforti Hòfer, Onehundredseventyeight, Turin, Italy, 2021. The notebook is the result of artistic research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. A path that integrated the question, What comes first?, the title of the itinerant educational format AtWork, with the usual gender-oriented practice between dress and habitus of the project Onehundredseventyeight, conducted by the artist since 2011. The notebook consists of 70 images selected by the artist from as many research notebooks - one for each - to compose a unique Book of Fortune that refers to the site-specific installation and aims to involve the public further. Courtesy of the Moleskine® Foundation Photography by Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.