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An Art Story: the Lissone Award
From July 10 to September 12, 1999

Organized by Claudio Rizzi
The catalog “Una storia d’arte: il premio Lissone” is published by Civico Museo Parisi Valle, 1999

FROM INFORMAL TO POP ART, FROM ENNIO MORLOTTI TO VALERIO ADAMI
Throughout summer our museum will host some of the works that participated in the editions of the Lissone Award (1946-1967); they are perfect examples of trends and techniques both in Italian and international art during the 50’s and 60’s. This exhibit is made of 42 wide canvases that were bought by Lissone, the commune in Brianza, on every edition of the awards. This can be considered a small but exhaustive anthology of all the important artistic currents of those years: Informal, Abstractionism, Pop Art, Nouveau Realisme.

THE STORY OF THIS COLLECTION
Right after World War II, the Famiglia Artistica Livornese, an association of local painters and artists, felt a need to draw the attention of local businesspersons and important national personalities to the “state of the art”.   The members of the jury were rigorously chosen for their unquestionable impartiality and competence (De Grada, Valsecchi, Argan and Marchiori were some of them); this was the first step towards the creation of a cultural event that would grow more and more important, from the first edition of 1947 that was open only to Italian painters, to that of 1952 to which foreign artists from many European countries were invited and where non-competing works by well known artists were displayed as well.  The winning works were bought by the commune, and the first prize became bigger and bigger, as did the number of prizes and gifts from various businesses and associations. At one point the Lissone Award became so important and prestigious that it was compared to the Biennale di Venezia.    This adventure ended in 1967, when the years of the protest movements began and the tensions and motivations that generated the award slowly faded away.
An analysis and reconstruction of these events can be found in the catalog published by the Commune of Maccagno, which can be bought at the museum.

FROM MORLOTTI TO ADAMI, TWENTY YEARS OF HISTORY AND ART IN THE PAINTINGS OF LISSONE
The first painting to become part of the collection is Immagine (1951) by Ennio Morlotti, the second is Composizione (1952) by Mauro Reggiani; a comparison between these two very different works shows the climate that started developing after the war, stimulated by the opposition of Abstractionists and post-Picassian neo-cubists.

Morlotti, who was still following Cèzanne’s guidelines, used his spatula to create shapes that – while being distorted and made of segmented lines – were clear and figurative.  Reggiani’s paintings, instead, were made of precisely divided sections of different colors, a rational and sophisticated type of painting that resulted in spaces and hues that lived their own life disconnected from the physical world.
The other paintings from the 50’s illustrate the various directions that Informal Art took in the techniques and methods that Italian and foreign artists used to express themselves. The winner of the 1953 Lissone Award is Theodor Werner, a German artists who learned Braque’s and van Dogen’s lessons very well; this cosmopolitan painter started in Germany a type of Abstractionism enriched by an informal flavor. His painting – significantly entitled Contrasti (Contrasts) – is entirely based on the contrast between pure colors and absence of color, between positive and negative signs, between materials and paint.

Birolli, an Italian artist, is the winner of the next edition with the painting entitled Ondulazione marina. Birolli is politically active and member of “Corrente” along with Guttuso and Cassinari. His early works were mainly influenced by expressionists such as van Gogh and Ensor, but from the 50’s on he moves towards French abstractionists such as Bazaine and De Stael. This painting is evidence of Birolli’s passion for a naturalistic type of Abstractionism, quite different from that of abstractionists like Reggiani and others. Both the paintings by Tàpies (Terre sur marron foncè, 1956 – Lissone Award 1957) and Feito are representative of Spanish Informal Art, with their use of layers of clotted colors organized into deceptively random shapes. 

Informal Art is clearly recognizable in the paintings by Perilli, Vedova and Dorazio. Perilli’s painting (1959) documents the interest in the relationship between painting and writing, typical of those years, while Immagine del tempo by Vedova mirrors reality and contradictions of his time with an extremely personal and flowing style. Quite different is Dorazio’s choice (consistent author of Teodora, 1959 and Tenax, 1964), who is only interested in the phenomena generated by the relationship between colors and light.  No exhibit about European Informal Art would be complete without at least one work by the international group Cobra, which is here represented by Composizione, the 1956 painting by Karel Appel: acid and deafening colors are crudely applied with aggressiveness and violence to create layers of matter, curves, and disturbing, vaguely human shapes.

Andrè Marfaing is a different kind of expressionist; displayed here is a beautiful painting from 1960 entirely based on all the shades of black and white.  This French artist assimilated the lesson of Tàpies and the other representatives of “Art Autre,” to move on – from the 60’s – to diluted ink and engraving, while systematically studying Goya’s works.

Lissone Award’s second decade is represented by a more diverse production that encompasses the moods and sensitivity of European artists, who show a renewed interest in figurative art, surrealism and unconscious, as well as new technologies and mass media. The relationship and the confrontation with the American currents (New Dada and Pop Art) becomes closer, but European intellectuals refuse to take a more commercial and recognizable direction and reaffirm, instead, their expressive independence and detachment from a merely aesthetic research. Man has to deal with and move inside a reality that can’t be ignored, but it can be reinterpreted and tamed following individual schemes.
Dufrêne applies this very principle to his dècollages, and so do – though slightly differently -  Tinguely and Klein, two representatives of Nouveau Realisme. Dufrêne retrieves objects (torn posters, in this case) and gives them completely new roles, functions, and identities.
Peter Klasen, too, takes elements of modern mass communication, twists and ridicules them by just changing the perspective from which the observer sees them.
Valerio Adami and Mario Schifano, from Italy, analyze the problem with an embarrassing, subtle irony.  Adami borrows some techniques used by comic books and uses the most common and least pleasant objects as subjects of his works: toilettes, ugly buildings, etc.  The ambiguity of shapes generates puzzling perceptions that ask questions and annihilate all answers.
Schifano’s painting must be analyzed keeping in mind his later production, which concentrates on a study of advertising and the relationship between painting and mass media.
Finally, we would like you to focus on the very sophisticated painting by Sergio Romiti, an artist from Bologna, where the traditional use of colors – similar to that of Morandi – entirely based on black and white creates a synergy with dynamic effects directly inspired by his studies of photographic techniques.

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