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Pages of art
Wednesday 14 October at 5.30pm
Francis Bacon: The literary atmosphere
The author of the book Marco Tonelli in dialogue with Sergio Risaliti
The author retraces the work of Bacon analyzing the relationships with specific literary sources that the artist himself defined “atmospheres” and “devices of images” for his paintings.
Of the readings of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) we have news thanks to what he said, to what is told and written by the many and important critics who attended, but above all thanks to what was kept in the London studio of Mees Rews 7 or in the house of Dale Farm in Suffolk, now collected and archived at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in Dublin, his hometown.
Dostoevsky, Aeschylus, Baudelaire, Proust, Freud, Joyce, Berlin, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Conrad, Blixen, Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Burroughs, Bataille, Beckett, Gide, Tennesse Williams, Shakespeare, Spender are just some of the authors read and loved by Bacon who testify to his vast literary interests and who help to understand the cultural background of the works created between 1944 and 1992.
These sources, often cited by the most eminent Bacon scholars, have never received the same philological and “archaeological” attention as the visual ones, although they are written images or salient passages that may have inspired Bacon’s pictorial imagination.
Marco Tonelli
(Rome, 1971) , art critic, with De Luca Editori d’Arte has published La più mirabil cosa. Statue theory from Donatello to Rodin (2006); Pino Pascali. General catalogue of sculptures 1964-1968 (2011); The Art Horror Picture Show. From Transavanguardia to Transfunctionality (2011); Francis Bacon. Literary atmospheres (2014). He is also the author of the essay The Impossible Statue. Sculpture and figure in modernity, Marinotti Edizioni (2008) and the monograph Pino Pascali: il libero gioco della scultura, Johan & Levi Editore (2010).
He has curated catalogues and exhibitions of contemporary art including Fabrizio Plessi, Bill Viola, Candida Höfer, Mimmo Paladino, Bertozzi & Casoni, Maurizio Mochetti and was Councillor for Culture of the City of Mantua.
He is currently Professor of Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia and Artistic Director of the exhibition Materia Prima at the Fondazione Museo di Montelupo Fiorentino.
Sergio Risaliti
is the creator and curator of exhibitions and major events, writer and journalist. He founded and directed public and private exhibition venues including Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena and Quarter Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea in Florence. He has been responsible for the design and renovation of the MARCA Museum in Catanzaro. He was a member of the scientific committee of the Frac Rhône-Alpes in Lyon and of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna. He has edited the census of young Italian art Espresso (Electa, 2000), contemporary Tuscany (Maschietto, 2001), the artist’s books by Giulio Paolini La verità (Einaudi, 1996) and Dall’Atlante al vuoto (Electa, 2010), the general catalogue of graphics by Fausto Melotti(Electa, 2009).
In Forte Belvedere he edited, with Bonito Oliva, Belvedere dell’arte (2003). Since 2013 as artistic director he has always followed the solo exhibitions of Zhang Huan, Giuseppe Penone, Antony Gormley at Forte di Belvedere. Since 2011 he has designed and curated numerous exhibitions for Palazzo Vecchio, the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum and the Capitoline Museums in Rome. He regularly collaborates with “Il Venerdì – la Repubblica”, “Il Corriere della Sera -Firenze”, “Arte mondadori”.