BOLOGNA.- Palazzo Albergati is hosting the first, large-scale anthological exhibition in Bologna dedicated to one of the 20th century’s most extraordinary and moving artists: Antonio Ligabue.

The special relationship between Arthemisia and Antonio Ligabue came into being in 2017 with a major exhibition at the Vittoriano in Rome, followed by shows in Conversano and Trieste that garnered enormous success from critics and the public, helping to disseminate and raise knowledge about the work of an artist who is now among those most in demand on the national scene.

Landscapes, wild animals, scenes of daily life, and many, intense self-portraits: more than 100 opere – including oils, drawings, and sculptures – take centre stage in a unique exhibition itinerary. Through the canvasses’ potent emotional charge, the exhibition acquaints visitors with the life of a visionary and ill-fated artist – an artist who, although self-taught, was and to this day still is able to speak to everyone with immediacy and genuineness.

With so troubled a life, excluded by the rest of his people and viscerally bound to the world of animals and nature and far from the judgment of others, Antonio Ligabue was able to express his creative genius on canvas: a man so mad and so unique, who with his expressionistic harshness can even today pierce the very souls of the people viewing his works.

Over the years, this human and artistic story has thrilled thousands; Ligabue has even been featured in films and television series since the 1970s.

Appreciated and understood by important critics and scholars during the final years of his life, he then sank into oblivion after his death. Simplistically labelled a Naïve painter – a definition that ended up diminishing and underestimating his true artistic value –, Ligabue long remained in the shadows, a niche figure known only to a few enthusiasts and unfairly neglected by the major art circuits. Only in recent decades, thanks to renewed interest by critics and institutions, has his value as an authentic and original artist, albeit in his eccentricity, been fully comprehended. Beneath his often misunderstood talent lay a unique, layered poetics, able to render on canvas all the sublime simplicity and drama of the natural world.

However, in the attempt to reassess his artistic work, the human and personal aspect of Ligabue the man has often been ignored. And yet, to fully grasp his greatness, it is essential to consider both of these inseparably connected aspects.

With their unique and highly original style in depicting animal subjects with a nearly disconcerting realism, his canvasses were cast aside and dismissed as mere popular folklore. Thus the depth of his painterly exploration, his ability to grasp the most intimate essence of the depicted creatures while powerfully transmitting their primordial instinct, was lost sight of.

The exhibition at Palazzo Albergati in Bologna recounts the man and the artist, giving prominence both to his exceptional artistic talent and to his rich, inner life and unique personality.

Following a chronological subdivision, the various stages in the artist’s career are recounted starting from the first period (1927-1939), when the colours are still quite thin and diluted, and the themes are linked to rural life and scenes with ferocious animals in not overly aggressive attitudes; there are very few self-portraits. The second period (1939-1952) is marked by the discovery of greasy and substantial paint, and by an analytical finishing of the entire depiction.

The third period (1952-1962) is the most prolific phase, in which his mark becomes more vigorous and continuous, making the image stand out clearly from the rest of the scene. This last period saw a dense production of self-portraits, diversified depending on his moods.

Over the years, this human and artistic story has thrilled thousands; Ligabue has even been featured in films and television series since the 1970s.

In fact, alongside the more than 100 masterpieces – many of which wholly unknown, like Lince nella foresta (“Lynx in the forest”) (1957-1958), twenty pencil drawings on drawing paper (1961-1962) and several high-quality works that have not been shown for a great many years, including Circo all’aperto (“Open-air circus”) (1955-1956), Castelli svizzeri (“Swiss castles”) (1958-1959), Crocifissione (“Crucifixion”) (1955-1956), and a highly rare crayon, pencil, and India ink on paper, Leopardo e antilope e indigeno (“Leopard and antilope and a native”) (1953-1954) –, the figure of Ligabue is also defined by an excerpt from Giorgio Diritti’s film Hidden Away, with the masterful performance of Elio Germano, released in 2020 after the memorable RAI television series by Salvatore Nocita in 1977 starring Flavio Bucci.

A complete album of drawings, lost for years and recently rediscovered, that Ligabue did while sojourning, during the final period of his life, in the “La Croce Bianca” inn (operated by the family of the famous "Cesarina," the platonic love of his life), is being shown for the first time, along with some of the wild beasts housed at Museo Lazzaro Spallanzani, Musei Civici di Reggio Emilia – the same ones that Ligabue himself observed for hours inside the museum, in the company of his friend Sergio Negri. Other than on these visits, Ligabue had no way of seeing or getting to know these wild beasts in person, and he studied them carefully in order to depict them on his canvasses – now set in comparison for the first time.

The exhibition also includes a recently discovered album of Liebig trade cards from 1954, which Ligabue would consult and use as inspiration for the depiction of various animals in his works.

With the patronage of the Municipality of Bologna, the exhibition is produced and organized by Arthemisia in collaboration with the Municipality of Gualtieri and Fondazione Museo Antonio Ligabue, is curated by Francesco Negri and Francesca Villanti, and recounts the life and work of a man who made art the redemption of his very existence.

The catalogue is published by Moebius and enriched with two original contributions: an essay by the director Giorgio Diritti, which offers a cinematographic perspective, and an analysis by Francesca Romana Morelli on the relationship between Ligabue and Renato Marino Mazzacurati. These two texts offer, for the first time, a complete reading of the painter’s dual success as a man and as an artist.

THE LIFE OF ANTONIO LIGABUE

We cannot talk about Ligabue’s art without knowing about his life. Nor can his works be understood if we do not enter into the world of that small, unfortunate, mad man, so full of talent and poetry.

Born in Zurich in 1899 to a mother from Belluno and an unknown father, he was immediately adopted by a Swiss family. When still a teenager, he began manifesting the psychiatric problems that led him, in 1913, to his first internment in a home for youths with disabilities.

In 1917, he was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic after an attack on his adoptive mother Elise Hanselmann who, after a number of incidents, would decide to file a complaint against him, thus securing Antonio’s expulsion from Switzerland on 15 May 1919; he was sent to Gualtieri, the municipality of origin of his step-father (his birth mother’s husband, whom he would hate forever).

Speaking no Italian, inclined to rage, and misunderstood by his contemporaries, Ligabue was nicknamed “el Matt” (“the madman”) by the residents of Gualtieri, who refused his paintings and denied his artistic worth, forcing him to choose a life of alienation and solitude.

After tormented, restless years of vagrancy during which he lived solely on meagre public assistance and took refuge in art to express his existential unease, between 1928 and 1929 he met Renato Marino Mazzacurati (a major important artist in the Scuola Romana movement), who saw his artistic talent and taught him how to use oil paint.

With a singular expressionist drive and a purity of vision typical of the wonder of someone discovering – as in childhood – the secrets of the world, Ligabue devoted himself to depicting the struggle for survival of the animals of the forest; he did his self-portrait in hundreds of works, grasping the torment and bitterness that had scarred him, also because of the hostility and incomprehension that surrounded him. Only occasionally did he appear to find some serenity by depicting work in the fields and the animals he loved so much and considered his siblings.

He was again hospitalized at the San Lazzaro psychiatric institution in Reggio Emilia for self-harm in 1937, and for “manic-depressive psychosis” in March of 1940.

In 1948, he began to show his works at small exhibitions – and, under Mazzacurati’s guidance, to obtain some recognition and earn his first money.

But success was brief: after allowing himself some luxuries, in 1962 he was seized by paralysis and admitted to the Guastalla hospital, where he continued to paint, and where his life came to an end on 27 May 1965.