A day in memory of Enrico Crispolti at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts

On April 4, 2019, theBrera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan will host a day dedicated to art historian and critic Enrico Crispolti (Rome, 1933 - 2018), who passed away last Dec. 8. With free admission, the conference, entitled Enrico Crispolti. Testimonies of a Shared Experience, will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., and will feature talks by various cultural figures. The day will be introduced by the president of the Academy, Livia Pomodoro, and the director, Giovanni Iovane, and will be curated by Luisa Somaini, with the collaboration of Ignazio Gadaleta and Livia Crispolti. Taking turns at the microphone will be artists, art, architecture and design historians, curators, museum and archival directors, gallery owners, art publishers, restorers and former students, mostly active in the Lombard capital, who will report on an important moment of shared work with Crispolti, analyzing their mutual professional and human repercussions.

In fact, the meeting aims to analyze the method by which, in more than sixty years of “militant” commitment, Crispolti has updated his knowledge of contemporary artistic languages and new media, framing the artist’s reasons for doing in the cultural context of reference. A scholar of futurism, informal art, Pop Art and artists of different tendencies such as, for example, Lucio Fontana and Renato Guttuso, Mattia Moreni and Valeriano Trubbiani, from the second half of the 1950s, Crispolti gave life to one of the largest private Italian archives as a center of documentation of the contemporary, which allowed him to set up major publishing projects such as Nuovi Archivi del Futurismo (promoted by La Quadriennale di Roma and published by De Luca), or L’Informale. History and Poetics, published by Beniamino Carucci, Assisi-Rome, started in 1971 and since 2018 partly republished by De Luca.

Opening the proceedings is a short documentary film that collects some reflections by Enrico Crispolti on the role of the historian and art critic. The film is taken from a larger documentary Arte a Critica, conceived by Angelo Casciello and made by Gennaro Visciano in his studio in Via di Ripetta 132, Rome, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, thus initiating Project 80. The April 4 day will be followed, according to the wishes of the Crispolti Archive, by similar days: in Rome, on May 27 at the Department of Art History of La Sapienza University, curated by Ilaria Schiaffini and Claudio Zambianchi; in the fall, in Siena, at the Department of Historical Sciences and Cultural Heritage of the University degli Studi di Siena, curated by Massimo Bignardi and Luca Quattrocchi; in Florence at Le Murate Progetti Arte Contemporanea, curated by Valentina Gensini; and in Baronissi (Salerno), at Frac (Museo Fondo Regionale d’Arte Contemporanea), curated by Massimo Bignardi. The five appointments, as a whole intend to constitute a first in-depth review of the multifaceted activity of the scholar Enrico Crispolti and his eclectic personality, composing a mosaic of voices through the interventions of those who collaborated and trained with the scholar.

Speakers in Milan will include Umberto Allemandi, Roberta Cerini Baj, Luca Massimo Barbero, Renato Barilli, Luca Beatrice, Silvia Bignami, Alessandro Bonfanti, Paolo Campiglio, Michele Casamonti, Ursula Casamonti, Giuliano Collina, Dario Cimorelli, Fernando De Filippi, Rachele Ferrario, Barbara Ferriani, Lorenzo Fiorucci, Maria Fratelli, Ignazio Gadaleta, Giuliano Giuman, Lorenzo Giusti, Fulvio Irace, Paolo Laurini, Umberto Mariani, Paolo Marraccini, Franco Marrocco, Anna Mazzanti, Gabriele Mazzotta, Giuseppe Melzi, Anna Maria Montaldo, Antonello Negri, Ugo Nespolo, Luca Pietro Nicoletti, Anty Pansera, Alessandro Pioselli, Fabrizio Plessi, Francesco Poli, Francesco Porreca, Amedeo Porro, Luisa Somaini, Valentina Sonzogni, Francesco Tedeschi, Marco Tonelli, Giorgio Zanchetti.

In the image, Enrico Crispolti, in 2005, in Milan, at the Naviglio Modern Art Gallery, photographed by Ignazio Gadaleta in his work-ambient Celesti magnetici (to the sky of Milan). Courtesy Archivio Crispolti Arte Contemporanea, Rome.

A day in memory of Enrico Crispolti at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts

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