Memorial Day, Uffizi dedicates focus to Aldo Carpi, painter interned at Mauthausen-Gusen

On the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Uffizi Galleries is dedicating an exhibition focus to the painter of Jewish origin Aldo Carpi (Milan, 1886 - 1973), which will be set up on the second floor of the Gallery.

An established artist since the early twentieth century, an esteemed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan since the 1930s, and the author of an imaginative and uncategorizable painting style, Carpi, following a delusion about his origins, was interned in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp where he remained from February 1944 to May 1945. During those months, in defiance of the strictest writing prohibition, the artist narrated life inside the camp firsthand through an intense diary in the form of letters addressed to his wife and drawings that was later published in 1971 under the title Diary of Gusen.

From these pages emerges Carpi’s constant struggle to preserve his intellectual and moral (as well as physical) dignity, undermined day after day inside the lager, but sustained by the consoling power of religion and family but also of nature. Alongside the constant presence of death, poetic meditation on a flower, a memory, a space of sky also emerges. The drawings that flank the letters, in their chronistic rendering of the reality of the lager (the piles of corpses in the crematoria, the mangled bodies of the internees) testify with unparalleled documentary force to the absurdity of the horror.

There are three works by Carpi in the Uffizi collections: the self-portraits of 1925 and 1964 and the painting After Dinner of 1913, the latter usually exhibited in the Modern Art Gallery of Palazzo Pitti. These will constitute the dedicated exhibition focus.

Memorial Day, Uffizi dedicates focus to Aldo Carpi, painter interned at Mauthausen-Gusen

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