Catalog

Tied to memory, archives have always spoken to the need to collect and safeguard evidence of the past. An artist’s archives are critically important both to preserving material evidence of participation in certain cultural circles and to determining, defending and certifying the authenticity of works while ensuring they can be accessed and shared. But what exactly is an artist’s archive and how is it structured? What legal measures and customs apply? How are successions organised, and what goes into drawing up an annotated catalogue? What skills and features make archives key reference tools for scholars and the marketplace?This volume – created by AitArt (the Italian Association of Artists’ Archivists) for its course for curators of artists’ archives – addresses various perspectives and areas of specialisation, from humanistic-historical topics to economic-legal issues, as well as more practical considerations of filing and digitalisation. In seeking both to illustrate underlying principles and propose operating procedures, it outlines a full-fledged professional code of conduct, an invaluable guide for anyone needing to develop specific professional skills or in charge of overseeing the complex, invaluable ecosystem that is an artist’s archive.

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.

Charles Baudelaire, considered the father of modern poetry, also wrote some of the most influential and daring prose pieces of the 19th century. A frequent presence at the Paris salons, he made a point of expressing his theories on modern art and artistic philosophy through incisive, unflinching criticism.This brief essay revolves around the principles of Romanticism, as Baudelaire takes the reader through a methodical analysis of Delacroix and Ingres, revealing his conviction that the pursuit of ideals is a key ingredient of artistic expression. His perspective is of great help in understanding art criticism in 19th-century France, plus changing opinions on the essence of Romanticism and the artist as a creative genius.The preface by Adolfo Tura offers a new perspective on this fundamental text, highlighting its importance for today’s public.

The focus of this essay is an evolutionary moment in painting driven by the modern age which Charles Baudelaire contributed to ushering in. In his insightful observations on culture, he did not simply admire and comment on many of the leading painters of his day, but also foresaw, and even encouraged, a new art whose first audacious manifestations did not materialise until forty years after his death in 1867.In response to signs of modernity in the arts, Baudelaire, who more than any other poet was possessed by a wish to flee anywhere out of the world, contended that disdain for the “natural” was actually an attempt to grasp a deeper truth. Day-to-day life was not to be escaped, but rather renewed artificially. Baudelaire remained firmly attached to reality, pointing to aesthetic experience as the antidote to the nihilistic malaise rooted in unsettled randomness, with memory identified as the way to introduce beauty into the world.Adolfo Tura expertly weaves together possibilities and echoes of the past, ultimately revealing how the poetics of memory resurfaces in the motifs and atmospheres of one of the 20th-century masters, Henri Matisse. Guided by Baudelaire’s flame, he revisits some of the most noteworthy figures of modern art, from Mark Rothko to Louise Bourgeois, offering the reader the enchanting experience of brand-new look at what the most modern of the moderns referred to as “imagination”.

Those who love art will certainly have noticed a development which, though momentous, is seldom discussed: the absence of genuinely religious works, meaning those whose religious sentiment is free of irony or irreverence, in galleries and museums of modern art. The schism between art and religion, far from being a conspiracy of the art world, has distant roots. Having gradually come into being in the Renaissance, it intensified in the 19th century, until today the break appears irreparable. To mend it, the underlying idea of the entire modernist project must be dismantled.This book, which couples rigorous analysis with experimentation, breaks the deafening silence around an issue so thorny it defies attempts to address it both in official art circles and the world of art education. Indeed, this silence forces students to cultivate their religious feelings in secret, lest they be excluded from the system. Drawing on his experience at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, James Elkins takes a pragmatically innovative approach to the tangled mass of practices, opinions and misunderstandings, choosing five students of his who each hold a distinct position on the question: five artists’ accounts which deftly describe the troubled relationship between religion and modern art.But the good intentions of a few isolated figures cannot satisfy the author’s wish for a healing of the chasm of incomprehension between the two sides. What is needed are brand-new forms of dialogue, conversations able to encompass the full scope of the participants’ emotions and experiences. Elkins is already working in this direction, providing artists, students, teachers and scholars with the tools needed to start a constructive, enthralling debate.

Count Francesco Mancinelli Scotti, descendent of an Umbrian noble family fallen on hard times, was gripped at roughly age forty by an “insane passion” for archaeology and digs, leading him to devote his next forty years to “devastating” northern Lazio. A man of momentous impulses, such as his enlistment with Garibaldi’s forces at age twenty, Francesco Mancinelli Scotti went on to become a tireless, and quite successful, excavator, collector and merchant of antiquities, selling what he found in digs to American collections and museums, often based on altered information on the pieces’ origins. This side of Mancinelli Scotti’s approach is of particular interest, given that he was active in the same years in which the government established an initial framework for regulating digs, preventing the indiscriminate export of archaeological materials abroad and keeping the antiquities on the market from being dispersed. The dual goal of this volume, therefore, is to portray Francesco Mancinelli Scotti, and the impact of his frenetic exploration, while also promoting further reflection on how best to safeguard our cultural heritage.

In the 21st century, the private museum has become a cultural, social and economic phenomenon of global scale. Over the last twenty years, a fulsome landscape of successful modern-art institutions has been created by collectors, even businesses, with noteworthy examples being the museums of François Pinault, as well as foundations affiliated with leading fashion brands. Closely tied to their founders’ tastes and visions, private museums are often derided as “trophy sepulchres” or expedients for tax purposes, and yet the actual situation is far more nuanced and complex.This overview –which Georgina Adam arrived at after researching more than fifty private museum entities in the United States, Europe, China and elsewhere – combines hard facts with the declarations of those directly involved, tracing the underlying motives and implications of the boom. Why do collectors create their own facilities instead of donating works to local institutions? How do they finance them? Are these nothing more than vanity projects or are they genuine philanthropic initiatives? With great acumen, the author explores the thin line between personal ambition and public good, providing a glimpse of individuals and scenarios both controversial and intriguing.

After serving as the Kunsthalle Bern’s youngest-ever director, and as the general secretary of documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972), Harald Szeemann severed his ties with the institutional world, taking a radically different approach to the form and content of exhibitions by expanding their focus to include not just the modern art on display, but also private and historical considerations conveyed through the very layout of the exhibition itself.This brief essay, based on historic documentation, interviews and previously unpublished notes found in the Szeemann archives in Lucerne, analyses a series of exhibits conceived of by the Swiss curator in the seventies, but never actually held, and in particular that entitled “La Mamma”.Part of a trilogy (“Le macchine celibi”, “La Mamma” and “Il Sole”), the project drew on a variety of disciplines, including history, religion, the visual arts, theosophy and feminism, as well as literature, psychoanalysis and anthropology, all for the sake of creating an exhibit with no art, but rather devoted to the study of women, to the evolution of the maternal figure and to the general idea of a female divinity.

In September of 1988, a young Nathalie Heinich went to see Harald Szeemann in his studio in Monte Verità. She interviewed him, seeking confirmation of her feeling that the figure of the curator increasingly resembled that of the artist. And who better to tell her than Harald Szeemann, whose thirty years of curating exhibitions brought forth an approach all his own?Once the youngest-ever Director of the Kunsthalle Bern, Szeemann was also the General Secretary of documenta 5 in Kassel (1972), but he attained mythical status with the ground-breaking “When Attitudes Become Form”, a cathartic 1969 exhibition that broke with the past, in search of a new aesthetic. Among curators-creators, Szeemann is a “case apart”, thanks to an inimitable style that, found far from the beaten path, always heeded his own instincts, shifting the focus from the official value of a given work to an almost sentimental relationship with the artist and the materials on exhibit. A curator-creator must rely on his or her sixth sense, on private obsessions, focussing not on career advancement but on subjects that they, and they alone, can address.In defending his or her uniquely personal outlook, the curator moulds the contents of each exhibition, as well as the logical link between one exhibition and another, establishing a magnum opus which increasingly resembles one large, personal work driven by an intimate necessity, fuelled by the scenarios of a biographical arc, and not simply by chance or the dictates of an institutional program.

«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.

A sense of euphoria and invigorating plenty pervade the world of Jeff Koons and his body of work addressing the allure of mass-consumer goods, banal objects whose almost erotic enticement is further heightened by his use of mirror-like materials that turn the pieces into voluptuous temptresses who seek to seduce viewers by getting them to heed the same siren song which they themselves purvey.As brilliant and intense as his sculptures, Koons talks about himself and his work during these conversations with Massimiliano Gioni, held between 2018 and 2021. The interviewer’s critical insight prompts the artist to review key chapters of his past, from his childhood in Pennsylvania to his encounter with Duchamp, from his travels in Italy in search of the most skilled ceramics craftsmen to his recent commissions in Paris and Qatar. The underlying philosophy to art, which combines avant-garde tradition with an outlook of openness and acceptance of the world at large, is laid bare. Embracing a typically American form of eccentricity, Koons accepts his own history, taste and desires, even. His freedom from any distinction between high and low culture allows him to draw with equal ease from both home appliance stores and Italian renaissance art, with which he has always dealt on an equal footing. In total freedom.

The travel dairies of esteemed figures who took the Grand Tour, such as the explorer and Etruscan scholar George Dennis, the watercolour artist Samuel James Ainsley, and Elizabeth Hamilton Gray, a pioneering nineteenth-century female scholar of Etruria, still contribute to the study of Etruscan civilisation and the sites that were its cradle. But before these illustrious individuals came Wilhelm Dorow, a diplomat at the court of Frederick William III of Prussia, an historian, a man of letters and an orientalist, but first and foremost an archaeologist and collector of antiquities. In fact, he was one of the first to visit the cities of ancient Etruria with a scholarly focus, documenting the artistic and archaeological treasures of the hinterlands of Siena and Arezzo, between Cortona, Chiusi and Arezzo.Dorow’s notebook, published almost twenty years in advance of George Dennis’s celebrated The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, is a key source for the history of Etruscan studies and the collection of antiquities. This Italian edition, translated from the French version of 1829, comes complete with the sixteen original prints. Dedicated to Bertel Thorvaldsen, with whom Dorow corresponded over the years, and who had words of praise for his collection, the notebook documents a trip that Dorow began from Florence in the summer of 1827.Accompanied by Squire Francesco Inghirami - author of, among other works, the imposing illustrated volume Monumenti Etruschi - and by the artist Giuseppe Lucherini, whose task it was to portray the ancient artefacts, Dorow’s in-depth knowledge of the Italian context sets his account apart from those of his English contemporaries, thanks to sharp, precise insights that, even today, are of great use to archaeologists. His descriptions of visits to the places where the most important Etruscan artefacts are found, and to the leading private collections of Etruscan antiquities, are rendered all the more thorough by Lucherini’s painstakingly detailed drawings. What emerges is an overview of Etruria in the 19th century, highlighting Dorow’s invaluable contribution to reconstructing the history of the collections and their destinies, and all this in the decisive years when mere curiosity for Etruscan antiquities was evolving into serious scholarship.