Farewell to Enrico Crispolti, scholar of 20th century art

Enrico Crispolti, one of the most celebrated scholars of twentieth-century art, died in Rome today. Born in the capital in 1933, Crispolti had studied in Rome, where he was a student of Lionello Venturi, and then began his teaching career at the age of 30, in 1963, teaching a course on contemporary art at the Faculty of Architecture of Rome’s La Sapienza University. He became a full professor of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he taught from 1966 to 1973, then for twenty years, from 1984 to 2005, he had held the chair of Contemporary Art History at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Siena (and also at the same school he was, from 1986 to 1998 and then from 2001 to 2007, director of the School of Specialization in Art History).

Crispolti called himself a militant critic and edited the general catalogs of many of the great artists of the second half of the twentieth century: from Lucio Fontana to Enrico Baj, from Renato Guttuso to Guido Pajetta, and had edited monographs of Corrado Cagli, Mirko and Afro Basaldella, Charles Szymkowicz and many others. A scholar of Futurism, he also edited several volumes and exhibitions on the movement. In 1976 he had been entrusted with the curatorship of the Italian section at the Venice Biennale. Most recently, he had curated a Szymkowicz exhibition in Siena and the early twentieth-century exhibition in the Jacorossi collection in Rome, both held this year. He had also served as scientific supervisor at the major Lucio Fontana exhibition in Albissola Marina, which closed just six days ago.

Farewell to Enrico Crispolti, scholar of 20th century art

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