Tomás Maldonado studied at the “Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón” from 1936 to 1942 and began his career as a visual artist. As a young man in Argentina, he was already firmly established in the art world.

In his early paintings, he worked with geometric abstractions, creating a controlled and lucid play with visual perception. In 1935, he was part of the avant-garde movement with artists such as Elena “Lidy” Prati, Alfredo Hlito, Manuel Espinosa, Raúl Lozza, Enio Iommi, and Oscar Nuñez. He then founded a group on concrete art, which understood it as pure sensation.

Max Bill invited him to Ulm in 1954. They met because Maldonado came to Europe at that time to write a book about Bill.

From then until 1967, Tomás Maldonado taught at the “HfG Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm” in the basic course and in the areas of product design and visual communication. He was even rector of the HfG from 1964 to 1966. He gave lectures worldwide as an ambassador for the university and taught in many cities as a guest lecturer. He also significantly shaped the discourse in the university's own magazine “ulm” and wrote important articles such as “Is the Bauhaus Still Relevant?”, published in issue 8/9, 1963.

His former student and later colleague and companion Gui Bonsiepe says of him: “It would be a nonsensical endeavor to try to describe Maldonado's multifaceted personality with labels—painter, philosopher, designer, educator, critic, theorist ... That is all true, but it falls short.”

Maldonado's scientification of design theory, later known as the “Ulm model,” was not based on talent and the development of craftsmanship, as Max Bill took over from the Bauhaus, but on scientific problem awareness and problem-solving behavior. In this way, he not only changed the basic teaching at the HfG, but also influenced design teaching worldwide. To this day, the basic principles of his theory are used at numerous universities in the field of industrial design.

After his time at the HfG, he developed into one of the world's most important design theorists and made a formative contribution to the cultural debate on design issues.

In 1966, Maldonado became a member of the Council of Humanities at Princeton University, where he held the chair of the Class of 1913 in the School of Architecture from 1967 to 1970. His presidency of the international umbrella organization of industrial designers “ISCID – International Council of Societies of Industrial Design” lasted from 1967 to 1969. From 1976 to 1984 he held a professorship for environmental design at the University of Bologna, edited the magazine “Casabella” from 1977 to 1981, and also contributed to the creation of the Industrial Design department at the Polytechnicum in Milan.

One of his most important works is his 1970 book “La speranza progettuale,” in English “Design, Nature and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology” in which he talks about environmental destruction and social change as issues that all designers must surely address. His approaches are still valid today.

During his lifetime, Maldonado received numerous honors, such as the “Compasso d'Oro” in 1995, the Italian State Prize in 1988, an honorary doctorate from Milan Polytechnic in 2001, and the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2012.

In his last years, Tomás Maldonado devoted himself to classical painting again and was thus also represented in the exhibition “Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965” at the “Haus der Kunst” in Munich from 2016 to 2017. (kl)