Nice coup for Prato's Pecci: museum acquires entire Lara-Vinca Masini library

The Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato, one of Italy’s leading contemporary art museums, has scored an important coup, which is also wonderful news for culture: the institution has in fact acquired the archive-library of Lara-Vinca Masini, a Florentine art historian and militant critic who passed away on January 9, 2021 in Florence. The acquisition took place as part of Archivissima 2021 and thus goes to enrich the museum’s CID - Center for Information and Documentation of Visual Arts, which is strong with a heritage of 66,000 volumes and a newspaper library with more than 300 journals. With this transfer, the Prato museum significantly increases its documentary heritage and expands its scientific vocation and its nature as an institution for study, research and cultural production.

The acquisition is part of a context of great attention and enhancement of the archival heritage, a fundamental part of the program of Pecci’s director, Cristiana Perrella. The archives and the materials they preserve, which can be placed between the status of the document and that of the work of art, will moreover be the protagonists of the exhibition Musei di carta, curated by Stefano Pezzato and Andrea Viliani, Curator and Head of the CRRI (Castello di Rivoli Research Center) that the Pecci Center will inaugurate next fall.

A fundamental contribution to the acquisition of Lara-Vinca Masini’s archive-library was offered by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, to whose collaboration with the scholar, supported over the past ten years through a life annuity, we owe the preservation and arrangement of her conspicuous collection of study materials with a view to its final destination at the Pecci Center, according to what she established in 2010 with a deed of gift. Indeed, the deed stipulated that the archive would remain in her possession for life and that it would be inventoried and sorted by her. “I chose the Pecci,” Masini declared at the time of the donation, “because I believe it is, has been, and will be the only Tuscan regional center for contemporary art. The museum’s CID is a very important reality and I want my books to find a home there after my death.”

Founded in 1984 within the City of Prato and later merged into the Pecci Center, the CID/Arti Visive is a unique and valuable resource in Tuscany, which has about 66,000 volumes and a newspaper library with more than 300 journals, thanks to the Funds acquired over the years (from that of Ferruccio Marchi, publisher of the Centro Di to that of Francesco Vincitorio, editor of the magazine NAC, from the archive of the artist Mario Mariotti to that of the architect Leonardo Savioli and his wife Flora Wiechmann, to name a few). The arrival of the Masini archive will be the occasion for a renovation of its spaces, with 700 square meters of reading and consultation rooms that will be reopened to the public of Italian and international students and scholars in the coming year, with the aim of making the collected and preserved materials increasingly accessible, making them living matter, the origin of new ideas and new thinking about art, and consolidating the role of the Pecci Center within a network of cultural institutions founded on research, according to the programmatic lines of director Cristiana Perrella.

Waiting to be placed within the renovated space of the CID/Visual Arts, the archive-library of Lara-Vinca Masini, is currently stored in the museum’s new basement floor, where 800 square meters are reserved precisely for storage and archives. Its final arrangement and reorganization will be coordinated by the Pecci Center’s collections and archives manager, Stefano Pezzato, who has followed the acquisition process since the act of donation.

There are in the order of thousands of volumes joining the Pecci. The materials in the Masini bequest follow the order conceived by the Florentine scholar and are divided into thematic sections, art movements, criticism and publicity on art and architecture. Included are art exhibitions with publications and documents of more than 8,000 artists and more than 2,000 titles of group shows and the major exhibitions; architecture and applied arts, with materials of more than 700 architects, design materials and titles; art movements with titles of Art Nouveau, Futurism, Programmed Art, Visual and Concrete Poetry; hundreds of publications on art history and criticism, art and politics; art journals with about 1,200 periodical issues; volumes, posters and documents accompanying Masini’s own exhibitions and publications; a thousand graphics, 300 posters, 180 small works and objects of art.

This, the museum explains, is an artistic and cultural heritage of great interest that will not only be made available to scholars but, through special initiatives, will also be made known to an ever-widening public, both to further deepen and enhance this important figure within the national contemporary art scene and to generate new thinking about the present and the future by recounting the fascinating scholarly journey of Lara-Vinca Masini.

Pictured: a part of the archive-library of Lara-Vinca Masini.

Nice coup for Prato's Pecci: museum acquires entire Lara-Vinca Masini library

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