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Paragone Arte 95

Anno LXII – Terza serie – Numero 95 (731) Gennaio 2011

Ferzan Ozpetek: Appunti su Giorgio Morandi
Anna Zanoli: io e… Pasolini e la forma della città. Memoria e ricerca intorno a una trasmissione televisiva
Tommaso Mozzati: “Ed io sono d’acqua e di pietra”. Il gusto di Pasolini per la scultura fra desiderio e sentimento d’eternità

APPUNTI

Francesco Arcangeli lettore di ‘Art News’ (Federica Rovati)

RICERCHE D’ARCHIVIO

La collezione di Ascanio Pio di Savoia fra Ferrara e Roma (Cecilia Vicentini)

SUMMARY

FERZAN OZPETEK 
“I see you have a wonderful Morandi” and “He´s the painter I love most”, says Steiner to the journalist Marcello in Fellini´s La Dolce Vita, which includes a shot of Morandi´s Still Life (1941, formerly Jucker collection). Another painting appears in Antonioni´s La Notte, and he, De Sica and Zurlini collected Morandi. Beyond having been a status symbol in 1960, Morandi´s work is also comparable to the filmic art in its creative process. Ferzan Ozpetek speaks admiringly of Morandi´s dream-like artistic vision, and how he shares this with the viewer. The painter´s imaginary spaces are inhabited, despite the absence of human forms; and though they are static — like cinematic frames — they express life and movement. Time and memory, with all their peculiarities, are an essential part of this vision.

ANNA ZANOLI
La forma della città (“the form of the city”), a fifteen-minute documentary broadcast on RAI-TV in 1974, was one of the rare occasions on which Pier Paolo Pasolini agreed to take part in an art programme on television, “io e…”. This article contains a transcription of its text, with unpublished non-edited sections, and captions describing the filmed sequences. The text is at once poetic and an example of passionate civic commitment. The dramatic close-ups of Pasolini´s wind-blown face have remained in the collective memories of millions of viewers and thousands of students who have since recorded and projected the film. Gianfranco Contini recalled this in a richly-worded commemoration of Pasolini, here published in its entirety. This testimonial article recounts the genesis and making of the film and also looks at the evolution of Pasolini, a student of Roberto Longhi and later a contributor to Paragone.

TOMMASO MOZZATI
The archaeology of Pasolini´s imagination has been broadly investigated during the last twenty years through the lens of the poet´s training with Longhi and through what he learned about painters and painting. The clear evidence of the numerous direct and indirect citations scattered throughout Pasolini´s writings and films has led to their consideration as primary sources of inspiration, and his dialogue with the art of painting as a privileged and constant analysis of his own aesthetic experience. Yet this point of view has entirely obscured the poet´s equally close interaction with the world of sculptors, and his declared taste for sculpture has consequently been overlooked. This investigation is limited to the period between the 1940s and the release of Accattone, and aims to cast new light on these relationships and predilections, which are pregnant with implications for the central issues of Pasolini´s poetics, such as the language of Desire and the feeling for History.

FEDERICA ROVATI
In the 1950s the American magazine Art News was an invaluable tool for Italian artists and critics as they sought to keep abreast of new pictorial idioms, from action painting to informal art. This study aims to identify how Francesco Arcangeli´s reading of the magazine was reflected in his writings, with particular reference to the crucial essay ´Una situazione non improbabile´ published in Paragone in January 1957. The focus is not only on the articles in Art News but also and above all the photographic sequences that documented how informal art was painted. Some passages of Arcangeli´s writings thus appear to be responses to how he was struck by photo essays on Pollock, Dubuffet and Fautrier.

CECILIA VICENTINI
The Pio di Savoia as collectors have been studied in recent years only in relation to some celebrated members of the family such as Rodolfo and Cardinal Carlo Emanuele, with the aim of casting light on how the Capitoline collections were established. Until now no consideration has been given to Ascanio, the brother of Cardinal Carlo, and the discovery of unpublished archival evidence has revealed interesting aspects of his activity as collector. In particular, some of the material in the Pio Falcò archive of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan has shown that a number of the paintings and drawings housed in Ascanio´s palazzo on the Via degli Angeli in Ferrara were taken to the family´s Roman residences after his death to enrich their extensive picture gallery; his eighteenth-century descendants preserved and expanded the collection until its sale to the present-day Capitoline Museum.

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