The rediscovery of Luigi Pericle, an artist forgotten for decades: soon the first Italian retrospective

The artistic patrimony of Luigi Pericle(full name Luigi Pericle Giovannetti, Basel, 1916 - Ascona, 2001), a forgotten artist for several decades, who was influenced by theosophy and esoteric doctrines and participated deeply in the artistic and cultural debate that was determined by these trends during the century, has re-emerged in Switzerland.

The story of Louis Pericles is currently at the center of a critical and philological recovery. The extensive project of study, restoration, preservation, cataloguing and enhancement of his artistic and documentary heritage is safeguarded by the nonprofit “Luigi Pericles Archive” Association, which coordinates a group of curators, technicians and specialists in the various fields of study addressed by Pericles. TheLuigi Pericles Archive in recent months has promoted, and continues to promote, a calendar of museum appointments and conferences for the appreciation of the artist in the international arena that aims to present the unpublished work of Luigi Pericles to the public.

The next appointment is with the exhibition Luigi Pericle (1916-2001)_Beyond the visible, at theScarpa Area of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice: this will be the first retrospective of the Italian-Swiss artist in Italy, promoted as part of the Venice Biennale. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, May 11, and will run until November 24, 2019. The anthological exhibition sinks into the folds of Luigi Pericle’s expressive investigation, his reflection on the language of sign and painting. The event is sponsored by, among others, the State Council of the Republic and Canton of Ticino, the Division of Culture and University Studies of DECS, the Consulate General of Switzerland in Milan, the Monte Verità Foundation of Ascona and the Eranos Foundation of Ascona. Also already confirmed is a solo exhibition at MASI in Lugano. According to Director Tobia Bezzola, in fact, Luigi Pericle “is an artist who deserves to find his place, and will find it, in the history of national and international postwar painting.” The intellectual côté, eclectic studies, and mystical vocation represent extraordinary sources of inspiration for an imagery that is nourished by numerous cultural references. Ongoing new studies on Pericles’ work aim to show how painting and drawing were for him the outcome, the manifestation in visible forms of inner worlds.

Luigi Pericle spent his life on the slopes of Monte Verità, which, in Ticino land, welcomed since the dawn of the twentieth century the famous community founded in 1900 by Ida Hofmann and Heinrich Oedenkoven on Utopia Hill, overlooking Lake Maggiore, where landed all the European “counterculture” of the time (you can read more on the subject in our review of the exhibition Art and Magic held in Rovigo between 2018 and 2019). It was in those same places that, starting in the 1930s, the extraordinary intellectual adventure of the Eranos meetings took shape, promoted by Carl Gustav Jung (whose Red Book was rediscovered in recent years and exhibited at the 2013 Venice Biennale) and the Dutch theosopher and painter Olga Froebe-Kapteyn. It is the cultural climate of Monte Verità that Luigi Pericle dreamed of attending when, in the early 1950s, he decided to move with his wife to Ascona, the artist chose that place to absorb the mystical aura of Monte Verità and immerse himself in its nature and peace.

A multifaceted man of a thousand interests, Pericles eluded classifications and turned out to be as much a professional artist as he was a talented cartoonist: in 1951, in fact, he created Max, the marmot protagonist of the textless comic strip of the same name, destined to become a well-known face not only in Europe but also in the United States and Japan. With his work as an illustrator, Pericles gained international fame, and his works were published by the Macmillan publisher in New York and in newspapers and periodicals such as the “Washington Post,” “Herald Tribune” or “Punch” magazine. In 1958, at the age of forty-two, Pericles destroyed all the figurative works in his possession (except for one specimen) and began a new phase in his painting production, turning toinformal abstractionism and special working techniques, which distinguished his work and made it the product of tireless experimentation. In 1959 his painting began to attract the interest of Peter G. Staechelin, a well-known collector in Basel. Thus began between the two a fervent collaboration and a relationship of esteem. Around 1959, in exchange for the many works he acquired, the collector gave the artist a house in Ascona, in which the Giovannetti couple would reside until their death. In order to acquire that property and donate it to his friend, Peter G. Staechelin deprived himself of some of Schiele’s and Klimt’s drawings by selling them to the Leopold Museum in Vienna, where they are still kept.

It is certainly no accident (but almost a fate) that Louis Pericles came to live in St. Thomas House (named by the artist in homage to Thomas Aquinas). In the 1930s, that dwelling had belonged to painter and collector Nell Walden, former wife of Herwarth Walden, writer, artist, theorist and founder of the famous magazine “Der Sturm,” spokeswoman for European expressionist trends and promoter of avant-garde movements. A house, then, dense with history, culture and deep moods imprinted in its environments by the intense figures who stayed there.

The years from 1958 to 1965 are defined by Pericles himself, the years of “radical change”: a period of unstoppable creative energy and enthusiasm, during which he made his most important exhibitions. In 1962, he came into contact with Martin Summers, gallerist and curator at Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery in London, in which Pericles held four exhibitions between 1962 and 1965: two solo shows, in 1962 and 1965, and two group shows(Contrast in Taste II and Colour, Form and Texture) both in 1964, exhibiting with Karel Appel, Antoni Tàpies, Jean Dubuffet and Pablo Picasso. During the solo shows, Pericles managed to sell many works to well-known collectors, such as Lady Tate and Sir Basil de Ferranti MP. In January 1965, Sir Herbert Read (art critic, co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and art advisor to Peggy Guggenheim), on the occasion of his readings at Eranos, visited Pericles’ atelier in Ascona and was impressed by his work. According to Sir Read, Pericles tends to the “search for Absolute Beauty” through abstract expression, pure and metaphysical form, capable of restoring and communicating through the harmony of line and color, the “profound essence” of things and their spiritual condition. He is introduced to Hans Hess, museologist and curator at the York Art Gallery. Hess in 1965 organized a traveling solo exhibition in a number of British museums. Consisting of 55 works, the exhibition will take place from March and September between York, Newcastle, Hull, Bristol, Cardiff and Leicester.

Pericles, for his part, after a season of international success marked by relationships and collaborations with men of culture, collectors of the caliber of actress Brigitte Helm (star of the cult film Metropolis) and leading galleries, in 1965 firmly decided to give up his career to devote himself solely to his art and esoteric studies by retiring to private life. The tension toward seclusion and abstraction from material goods became such that he sold his much-loved Ferrari (in the past he had even owned those of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman) and abolished any kind of worldly occasion.

Pericles belongs to that category of authors (the names of Hilma af Klint for painting, the subject of extensive retrospective exhibitions in major international museums and some of whose works were presented in the 2013 Biennale, Giacinto Scelsi for music, Carlo Mollino for photography and architecture, and Fernando Pessoa for literature, come to mind) who preferred to let their work speak only after their death, imprinting it nonetheless with an energy that would make their posthumous rediscovery necessary.

St. Thomas House, after the passing of Louis Pericles, who died without heirs in 2001, remained closed for fifteen years. All its glorious past, the marks left first by Nell Walden, priestess of a lyrical expressionism, and then by Pericles, mystical researcher and seer, were forgotten, buried for years in an uninhabited house swallowed by brambles. The House has now revealed intact an immense buried legacy of works, including paintings on canvas, masonite and India ink, as well as hundreds of unpublished documents, including essays, texts, letters, sketches, astral paintings, horoscopes and reading instructions, writings on ufology, notebooks dense with Japanese quotations and ideograms, arcane symbols and homeopathic recipes. A summa of universal thought catalogued, in his time, by Pericles with monastic rigor and remaining crystallized intact to this day. A heritage that will now be studied and properly enhanced.

Pictured: Louis Pericles, Matri Dei d.d.d. (1963; ink on pulverized silk paper, 42 x 60 cm)

The rediscovery of Luigi Pericle, an artist forgotten for decades: soon the first Italian retrospective

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