“My pride, my heritage” is the title of the exhibition on twentieth-century art that the Municipality of Pienza offers from 29 August 2020 to 10 January 2121, in the City Museum, in the heart of the magnificent Tuscan Ideal City.
And to clarify the title comes "the vision of Leone Piccioni", to indicate that that twentieth century in painting is what was chosen, brought together and hung on the walls of his home by a fine intellectual, Piccioni precisely, over the course of an entire life . Each collector, big or small, creates a collection that reflects him, which is a bit the real portrait of him.
The art collection that Leone Piccioni (Turin, 9 May 1925 - Rome, 15 May 2018) brought together throughout his long existence is the clear mirror of his having been one of the finest intellectuals that Italy has could boast the second half of the "long century".
Behind each of the more than 95 works exhibited at the City Museum there is a frequentation, a precise assonance, a reference to poetry or literature, a shared thought. But also the simple emotion of a moment.
The list, in strict alphabetical order of the artists of the Piccioni Collection, reads the names of: Afro Basaldella, Remo Bianco, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Carlo Carrà, Mario Ceroli, Filippo De Pisis, Piero Dorazio, Jean Fautrier, Lucio Fontana, Remo Formichi, Giosetta Fioroni, Franco Gentilini, George Grosz, Renato Guttuso, Carlo Guarienti, Mino Maccari, Mario Mafai, Giacomo Manzù, Mario Marcucci, Giorgio Morandi, Ennio Morlotti, Aleardo Paolucci, Ottone Rosai, Piero Sbarluzzi, Mario Schifano, Gregorio Sciltian , Graham V. Sutherland, Venturino Venturi.
Sometimes present in the Collection with several works, even very different in terms of characteristics and dimensions.
Piero Pananti and Gloria Piccioni, Leone's daughter, who curate the Pienza exhibition, underline the spirit with which the Collection has been established over time: «the love of beauty and culture, the impulse to share the arts and of knowledge, the elective affinities that bind the critic to his painters, poets, intellectual friends». And Piccioni's long association with Ungaretti immediately comes to mind and the choice of Dorazio to illustrate "La Luce", his collection of poems from the years 1914 - 1961. Because Piccioni, as an authentic intellectual, does not set fences, looking if anything for assonances between painting, literature, poetry, music, theatre… Within that Culture that he really knew how to disseminate in his television broadcasts, when TV was still an instrument, perhaps “the” instrument, for the cultural growth of an Italy in search of a new identity in the difficult but vital years after World War II.
Cover image: Alberto Burri, Cretto Bianco 1971, Etching and aquatint
