Johan & Levi: Biografie

In 1872, a man photographed a horse. It may seem a trivial act, but it marked the beginning of a revolution destined to change our perception of time and space. The man behind it was a figure as ambitious as he was enigmatic: Eadweard Muybridge, a brilliant landscape photographer and tireless experimenter who sought to ‘split the second’ – that is, to open a breach in time to reveal what the eye cannot isolate: movement.Photography, after all, was born and developed in step with a world that lives, travels and communicates at an accelerated pace, an expanding world made smaller by the telegraph and the railway. And it is no coincidence that the man funding those studies on movement was none other than Leland Stanford, owner of Occident – the champion trotter immortalised in Muybridge’s chronophotographs – and magnate of the Central Pacific Railroad. Not just any patron, but the very embodiment of the tensions between capital, private interests and progress that animated late-nineteenth-century America, and in particular California, the land of dreams reaching towards the future.Un fiume di ombre is not merely the story of a life; it is the account of a technological and cultural gamble. The breathtaking landscapes of Yosemite Valley and the views of San Francisco, created by ‘flaying the city’ and flattening it like an animal’s hide, are not mere backdrops; they are stages on a journey leading to the snapshot and – shortly thereafter – to cinema and the media industries. Rebecca Solnit paints a panorama which, like the grand urban vistas for which Muybridge was famous, weaves together different times and perspectives into a single vision, with a gaze that, starting with a horse, traces the gold rush, delves into the fractured world of Native Americans and reaches as far as Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

With the physique of a boxer and a spirit constantly in turmoil, Lucio Fontana ‘cannot sit still’: shaped by his experiences of the Great War and the two years he spent as a gaucho in the Pampas, he is engaged in a fight to the death on all fronts, even ‘against hunger’, as he himself would write to his father. His father would like his son to return home to Rosario, where a secure, if perhaps uninspiring, family business awaits him; but Lucio, in Milan with no commissions and no money for his studio rent, refuses to give in. It is this life torn between two worlds, Italy and Argentina, and between two ways of conceiving art, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that forces him into constant sacrifice and drives him to rebel, first against his bourgeois and traditionalist family heritage, then against the academic world and an art system hostile to any innovation; all in the name of Abstract Art – but a personal form of abstraction characterised by purity and freedom. From the inspired ‘intuitions’ of a sculptor and ceramist in Milan, Albisola, Paris and Buenos Aires, his tenacity led him to draft the Blanco Manifesto and to become not only the leader of the Spatialist movement, but also a point of reference for a new generation of artists.Paolo Campiglio attempts to unveil the man behind the infamous ‘cuts’, with his daily doubts and struggles, whilst also exploring lesser-known aspects of Fontana’s life: his relationship with his two mothers; his boundless generosity towards the younger colleagues he loved to surround himself with; and his relationship with the love of his life, Teresita Rasini, who would wait for him even when he was believed to be dead. What emerges from these pages is a combative figure, resistant to compromise, yet shining with an innate charm and an overwhelming sense of humour—qualities that led the critic Raffaele Carrieri to remark: ‘In everything he does, the intensity exceeds the normal level’.

‘Jewish by blood, Hamburg at heart, Florentine in spirit’: this is how Aby Warburg (1866–1929) liked to describe himself, a phrase that aptly captures his obsessive quest for self-discovery—cultivated through self-narration—and the significant shifts in direction that marked his life’s journey. If he is recognised today as one of the most influential art and cultural historians of the 20th century, it is in spite of his fragile mental health and a life as an ‘outlaw’, convinced that true insight belongs only to those prepared to deviate from society’s ordinary expectations.Having renounced his role as the eldest son in Germany’s wealthiest banking family and rejected Jewish orthodoxy, Aby followed his own intuitions and embarked on a journey through the world of symbols that took him from the Wild West to the heart of the Renaissance, in Florence. An independent scholar and free thinker, intolerant of the compartmentalised structure of the university yet in dialogue with the most progressive intellectuals of his time, Warburg pioneered a holistic methodology that integrates historical and artistic inquiry with sciences such as anthropology, medicine and psychology. This interdisciplinary approach guided his research into the survival of antiquity—distilled in his famous unfinished work Atlas Mnemosyne—and the creation of his extraordinary library, now housed at the Warburg Institute in London, a valuable resource for academics worldwide.Hans C. Hönes paints a detailed and intimate portrait of a man who, despite countless personal and professional difficulties, was ahead of his time, laying the foundations for contemporary art history.

‘History is not in the image, but in our relationship with the image, in what it deposits in us,’ writes Bertrand Schefer, who first saw some of Francesca Woodman's photographs in the late 1990s and was thunderstruck by them. Those photographs, so repelling to him at first, return over the years to question him, to torment him, incessant as drops, persistent as a love obsession. He vows to write about her one day, to shed light on the enigma she embodies, to save her from oblivion. It is not her photograph he wants to talk about, it is she he wants to bring back to life, if only for a few moments.Like an insatiable archaeologist, he then re-exhumes everything that can help him reconstruct that 'missing story'; a story in which the flow of his own personal memories, triggered by the blurred and unattainable figure of Francesca, is mixed with the young photographer's biographical story: her childhood in Colorado, her strong ties with Italy, her parents, who were also artists, her first camera, her formative years at art school, her stay in Rome that brought such a singular temperament to maturity. Francesca stands out from the crowd, atypical wherever she goes. In her faded period clothes, she portrays herself from time to time as a phantasmal presence, ineffable, sensual, anachronistic, already aware that the contemporary world is not the scenario in which she will find her own dimension. If her art is the engine that moves her, it is also the poison that consumes her, the prison from which one day in 1981 she will succeed in freeing herself by opening the window of her ramshackle flat, at the age of just twenty-three, leaving behind an immense body of work.

A lengthy hospital stay forces Remo Bianco to stop and assess his life, «The way sailors at sea control their course, calculating the exact distance from the destination». The year is 1982, and the artist feels his journey, begun in the inauspicious year of 1922 - the first of Italy’s fascist regime - is near. He leaves in his wake an eclectic body of work as daring as any avant-gardist’s: from his Spatialist period under the influence of Fontana to the more conceptual series and performances done in the orbit of the Cardazzo brothers, often in advance of French experimental art, plus the collages which followed his discovery of Pollock, and now appear to have inspired his approach to tying his recollections together.Remo Bianco seems to enjoy rearranging the pieces of his existence, inserting the results of urography and gastroscopy exams in his assemblages rather than following the banal pattern of birth, childhood, adolescence and maturity, a zigzag approach in keeping with his anarchic instincts. Memories, thoughts on art, ideas for future works and projects interweave and overlap. Every page of these “notes” confirms his multifaceted capacity to take whatever life brings – loves, literature, encounters, travels – and use it to produce wild, poetic flights of fancy, such as his idea for replacing the bell tower of St. Mark’s Basilica with an enormous pagoda.Framing this caldron of unfettered creativity are a number of extremely humorous, occasionally ribald anecdotes that include noteworthy fellow adventurers, such as de Pisis, Joppolo and Hains. Bianco leaves in the salacious parts, confirming his belief that an autobiography should «show the dirty linen, meaning the truth». With a preface by Sharon Hecker.

«Architects must be in touch with living, because living is everything»: words that would appear to have been on Lina Bo Bardi’s mind as early as 1946, when boarded a ship to Rio de Janeiro, her eyes filled with curiosity and her mind open, leaving behind the ruins of an Italy devastated by war. Travelling inside her were both Achillina, the impertinent girl marked by her disdain for the social mores and rules of her time, and Lina Bo, the young, tenacious professional who, following her university studies under Marcello Piacentini in Rome, went to Milan to fight for her independence in a world of men, becoming Deputy Director of Domus magazine while winning the esteem of Gio Ponti, Bruno Zevi and her future husband, Pietro Maria Bardi.Translating into thought and practice an existence in constant flux, Lina gave full expression to her original voice as an architect, designer, curator and set designer in Brazil. Her best known buildings – the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the Casa de Vidro, and the SESC Pompéia centre – reflect a focus on the collective, on ties to nature and folk traditions, making for extremely modern, unconventional architecture.The result of twenty years of research, Zeuler R. Lima’s portrait grasps the complexity of a woman who shunned the beaten path, journeying through her own contradictions without hesitation, tossed back and forth between her revolutionary impulses and the incurable melancholy of her soul. The author does not shy away from the more sombre side of her life, inevitably visible even in the photo of Lina on the deck of the ship on which she crossed the Atlantic, in keeping with the epithet coined for her by Valentino Bompiani, “the tired goddess”: a solitary rebel whose intellectual legacy is more alive today than ever.

There was once an impostor. There was once Paolo Ventura, photographer, painter, and set and costume designer. There was once because this autobiography is actually a fairy tale in which every reader will find something of their own story, their childhood and their city, if they were born in Milan, and Milan equals one hundred years of Italian life. There was once a child who went to eat at his aunt and uncle’s every Sunday and after lunch dreamt of vanishing like a ghost. And he must have wanted to be a ghost at home as well, when he was punished by his father, a talented illustrator but also a cruel wizard. There was once a boy who did poorly in school and escaped into a world of battles, trenches and soldiers on the front – an escape through drawing. As in all fairy tales, there were also good guys – the grandmother Giulia, who dresses the dead and teaches love, and Andrew, the twin brother, one of nature’s enchantments. And then there is Kim, and she is everything, a new beginning. The last time Paolo said “There was once” was when he left Paris, where he worked as a fashion photographer, and ended up in New York, entering the dark forest of the metropolis with nothing.  Far away, Paolo thought he was safe. And instead, one fragment after another penetrated the memory castle, terrible as war, gentle as the arrival of a circus on the outskirts of town. When he came out, it was day. There was once a fairy tale about the birth of an artist.There are 35 unrealsed coloured paintings.

The heirs to a textile dynasty whose social rise is the stuff of legend, the Morozov brothers certainly did not go unnoticed. Cultured, sophisticated and unconventional at the same time, they enchanted the Muscovite intelligentsia with their eccentricities. Fashionably dressed and surrounded by femmes fatales, gambling and living in mansions whose architectural styles were eclectic to say the least, they were art lovers and above all collectors.Mikhail was the first to take an interest in the new school of French painting. After his premature death, Ivan followed in his footsteps and developed what was soon to be an overriding passion. From 1904 on, he left his factories whenever possible to visit the most fashionable Parisian art dealers but seldom allowed them to dazzle him with their offers. He had a very clear idea of the works he wanted and of how to display them in the rooms of his stately home. He displayed matchless patience in the obsessive hunt for the finest works of his favourite masters and – according to Vollard, who called him “the Russian who doesn’t bargain” – never counted the pennies. In the space of a few years, he built up a superb collection including works by the Impressionists, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso and the finest Russian painters of the period, every bit as good as that of his compatriot Sergei Shchukin, whose sad fate it was to share after the Russian Revolution.The masterpieces that adorned the walls of the mansion at 21 Prechistenka were confiscated by the state, divided like playing cards between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and left to gather dust in the storerooms of museums for decades before coming to constitute the core of the modern art departments of the Hermitage and the Pushkin. The collection is now restored to its original splendour by Natalya Semyonova, who rescues the extraordinary figure of Ivan Morozov from the oblivion into which he was plunged by this twist of fate with all the verve of a novelist.

On coming face to face with Matisse’s scandalous Le Bonheur de vivre in 1906, Sergei Shchukin found himself shivering uncontrollably. The scion of an illustrious Muscovite family, Shchukin was a consummate collector of great experience at the age of just over fifty. After reviving the fortunes of his father’s textile business, he had spent a decade visiting Paris to gaze upon the avant-garde paintings exhibited there, the works by Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh whose glowing colours were to adorn the walls of the Trubetskoy Palace. In 1906, Shchukin recognized the wave of emotion that overwhelmed him whenever he felt that a work had to be his from the very first moment. This was the start of a close and fruitful relationship with Matisse that led to the creation of masterpieces like La Danse and La Musique, and marked the peak of Shchukin’s farsighted vision, as epitomized by his remark to the artist: “The public may be against you but the future is on your side.” A few years later, his new guest was none other than Picasso, initially greeted with all due circumspection but ultimately coming to dominate Shchukin’s already splendid body of works. The peerless collection thus built up was opened to the public on a regular basis before its confiscation by the state after the Revolution of 1917. On beholding that explosion of colours, the young Russian artists underwent a cultural shock equalled only by the passion to emulate those glowing canvases that was to inspire the works of future generations. In relating the life of the man and the patron of the arts, the authors necessarily also retrace the destinies of his four brothers, Nikolai, Piotr, Dmitri and Ivan, and the crucial part they played. Epitomizing the different aspect of patronage, they all helped with their collections to enrich the holdings of Russia’s museums. Together with them, Sergei Shchukin was the leading figure in a family saga interwoven with the stormy history of Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century and with the artistic revolution that turned Europe upside-down in the same period.

While a great deal has already been said about Giorgio Morandi the artist, it is still possible to address Morandi the man from another angle without necessarily avoiding the stages in his critical fortunes. This is precisely the approach taken by the collector Luigi Magnani, creator of the foundation that bears his name. Drawing on his long and close friendship with the Bolognese artist, Magnani places his erudition and sensitivity at the service of an elective affinity to paint an affectionate portrait. Without ever lapsing into facile hagiography or stroke-by-stroke description of the works, these memories flesh out the figure of Morandi and allow revelation to come through his own words, the very essence of the creative frenzy that manifests itself in everyday actions such as the extraordinary use of a telescope to establish the exact viewpoint of the landscape (“See the picture up there? I painted it in this room.”). The artist thus emerges “in his tastes, his moods and, no less, in his qualities”, one of which – as Stefano Roffi writes in the new foreword – is that of having always remained outside any artistic group and painted solely “for the few he felt capable of sharing in his world”. First published in 1982, Il mio Morandi bears witness to a sophisticated and self-effacing personality. It includes a series of letters by the artist that almost duplicate the narrative and make it more tangible. Rereading it today means not only retracing the course of a twenty-year relationship of mutual respect but also and above all rediscovering the most private and personal side of Morandi, the vision of an enigmatic, wizard-like and rigorous interpreter of nature, and recognizing “how much that is human found expression, through form, in his painting”.Foreward by Roberto RoffiAfterword by Daniela Ferrari

After taking “all the trains and all the ships”, Fabian Avenarius Lloyd settled in Paris, eager to make his fortune through poetry. At the age of twenty-two, with a talent less-than-proportional to his titanic build, he was ready to do whatever it took to make a name for himself. Not his name though: the name Arthur Cravan, a pseudonym he took on in 1910, together with the questionable epithet of “Oscar Wilde’s nephew”. He caused quite a stir at effulgent avant-garde soirées with his rough, eccentric party pieces. By day, he did boxing training in the studio of painter Kees van Dongen, getting ready to introduce the fist into the artistic struggle. Duchamp and Picabia were enraptured by his irreverence: from the pages of Maintenant, Cravan inveighed against the salons, firing poisonous arrows that would cost him eight days in the cooler and the esteem of the most respected critic of all, Félix Fénéon. When war broke out Cravan, a Swiss national, did a disappearing act. He turned up in Barcelona, disguised as a professional boxer, where he challenged black champion Jack Johnson. Posters proclaimed him the European champion, a title he gave himself without a single fight. The bout – which when it came was so brief it was in practice a static exhibition by his mammoth rival – earned him enough money to board a transatlantic liner bound for New York, putting an ocean between him and war-torn Europe. After wandering the United States and Canada “disguised as a soldier so as not to be a soldier”, he wound up in New York, where the Arensberg salon became the golden ring where he hatched new scandals and fuelled his “deadly plurality”, before his encounter with unscrupulous poetess Mina Loy turned out to be fatal. His exhortations to revolt, dazzling poetic insights, the strategy of art in the service of life and his anti-militarism all put Cravan among the pioneers of Dadaist adventure. So crazy as to seem made-up, his life is reconstructed here in detail, from his birth in Lausanne in 1887 to his mysterious disappearance in the Pacific in 1918, all through his mother’s exuberant correspondence. The man who emerges is a split personality, unusual, disruptive and extremely contradictory, more or less summing up the vices and virtues of an entire era.Foreword by Edgardo Franzosini

“He smiles and all the wrinkled skin of his face smiles, too. In a strange way. It’s not only his eyes that laugh, so does his forehead.  His whole person has the grey colouring of his studio. Perhaps in sympathy he has taken on the colour of the dust.” With these words, Jean Genet – one of his favourite models – described Alberto Giacometti, the sculptor whose indomitable character was sculpted onto his face by his troubled years and obsessive work. Besides, the activity in the studio on rue Hippolyte-Maindron was intense. Those who entered witnessed Giacometti working incessantly on his figures, relentlessly destroying and reconstructing them in a grueling pursuit of perfection, a tormented oscillation between an ideal to aspire to and aborted attempts, a back and forth of doubts and second thoughts. Just seconds ago he was laughing; now he turns to the sculpture-in-progress and, intoxicated by the contact of his hands with the mass of clay, completely ignores those around him. Born in 1901 in Borgonovo, Alberto spent his childhood in the rugged regions of Switzerland. His father initiated him into art at a very young age and followed his career step by step, providing encouragement and support. In 1922, Giacometti moved to Paris, where he began under the mentorship of Antoine Bourdelle and Zadkine but soon moved on – likewise briefly – to Breton’s Surrealism and Cubism. His rebellious spirit, which underlay all his explorations and rapid passage through the avant-garde movements, fated him to a solitary path on the fringes of the art world, despite his regular encounters with the most celebrated intellectuals of the time in the cafés of Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter. Under the spell of primitive art, he moved towards a more synthetic, disorienting representation, creating a host of figures forever advancing with an unsteady step, thanks to whom he achieved fame on the international art scene. “Never let myself be influenced by anything,” he wrote in a notebook. Indeed, Giacometti belongs to a timeless time, a quality of the most authentic essence of art.