Seventy years after its first edition, the review traces the story of the most innovative and revolutionary of the Italian painting awards, which accompanied the evolution of the artistic language of the second half of the twentieth century.
On the occasion of EXPO 2015, Lissone celebrates the cultural event which, following the end of the Second World War, placed the center of Brianza at the heart of the European cultural debate and witnessed the birth and development of the most innovative trends of the twenty years postwar.
Seventy years after its first edition, the Lissone Museum of Contemporary Art traces the history of the Lissone Prize, whose active and proactive nature was to remain, in the words of Guido Le Noci, "polemical and extremely avant-garde", and which followed the evolution of the creative language of the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to the participation of authors such as Emilio Vedova, Antoni Tàpies, Mattia Moreni, Ennio Morlotti, Karel Appel, Luis Feito, Mario Schifano and others.
The exhibition, scheduled from 24 May to 1 November 2015, curated by Alberto Zanchetta, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Lissone, presents 48 works, all belonging to the Lissone Prize collection, covering a period of time between 1946 and 1967, dates that mark the beginning and the end of the first award experience.
“We thought – declares Elio Talarico, Councilor for culture of the municipality of Lissone – that it was our duty to present to the public of EXPO 2015, one of the most internationally recognized excellences of Lissone. In fact, between 1946 and 1967, the Lissone Prize placed the city at the center of the international cultural debate, providing a valid dialectical space where the various artistic currents of those years confronted each other and the protagonists of Italian and Europe and the critical souls of the second half of the twentieth century".
As Alberto Zanchetta states, “The history of the Lissone Prize was a fundamental junction for all post-war painting. The event has in fact played a leading role, thanks above all to the prizes assigned by juries of excellence as well as the ability of the organizers to know how to update themselves in real time on the painting of the last century”.
“In order to enhance and disseminate the experiments in painting at an international level – continues Alberto Zanchetta -, the award has made it possible to acquire many works that are still part of the permanent collections of the MAC in Lissone today. The exhibition therefore aims to cast a broad and varied look at the events of the Lissone Prize, an occasion that will allow viewers to get to know and appreciate a competition that has contributed to writing an important chapter in the history of Italian art, and beyond ”.
The exhibition itinerary, divided into groups and artistic currents, is enriched by a rich apparatus of documents, correspondence, posters, telegrams, unpublished photographs and drawings, propaganda material, including invitations, announcements, posters and more, which testify to the importance of an award that has seen alternating juries composed of the most celebrated critics and art historians, such as Giulio Carlo Argan, Marco Valsecchi, Umbro Apollonio, Giuseppe Marchiori, Guido Ballo, Francesco Arcangeli, Pierre Restany, Will Grohmann, Jean Leymarie, Pierre Janlet and other.
The Lissone Prize, whose fame reached the notoriety of the Venice Biennale, reflected the dynamism of Italian and European art of those years, welcoming currents that ranged from Neorealism to Post-Cubism, from geometric abstraction to Abstraction Lyrique, from the Forma 1 group to the MAC group, from the Otto group to Corrente, from Origine to Cobra, from Spatialism to Nuclear, from Informal to Abstract Expressionism, from Nouveau Réalisme to Neo-Dadaism, from Pop Art to New Figuration, up to kinetic and programmed art.
Born with the intention of presenting a "living panorama of Italian painting", the Lissone Prize in its first editions saw the participation of national artists, opening up in 1953 to experiences from abroad. The Prize collection began to form with two works by Ennio Morlotti and Mauro Reggiani, ex-aequo winners of the VII edition, which represented the two opposing tendencies of contemporary painting, abstract and neorealist.
In the fifties, the prize took on a connotation close to the informal abstract; proof of this is the victory of the German artist Theodor Werner, advocate of a rebirth of this trend in Germany. The various facets of abstract art are also revealed in subsequent editions; for example, Renato Birolli, winner in 1955, an active exponent of 'Corrente', was the spokesman for a naturalistic abstract art.
Also in this decade, the informal cadences practiced in Spain by Antoni Tàpies and Luis Feito stand out, in which we note the use of a stratified and clotted pictorial material, organized within a morphological structure that is only apparently random.
The Informal assumes a clearly recognizable physiognomy in the canvases of Emilio Scanavino, Achille Perilli, Emilio Vedova and Piero Dorazio, which are joined by the research of the Cobra group, represented here by a "Composition" by Karel Appel.
The sixties of the Lissone Prize were characterized by a stylistically more varied production, which well recorded the moods and sensibilities of European artists, once again interested in figuration, in surrealist themes of the unconscious but also in new technologies and the mass media.
Their independence from their American colleagues, then at the height of critical and market attention, is expressed in movements such as Neo-Dada or Nouveau Réalisme, as in the case of François Dufrene's décollages, in which the French artist recovers objects – in this case torn posters – reinvesting them with a completely new function and identity compared to the initial ones, or in the Pop one by Mario Schifano and Valerio Adami, winner of the 1967 edition, the year in which it ends the adventure of the Lissone Prize, a point of reference for post-war pictorial research and experimentation, capable of monitoring artistic moods and trends, nurturing the ambition to transform itself, as Guido Le Noci had announced, into "something very different and very serious compared to the usual awards that are made in Italy”.
Artists on display: Valerio Adami, Karel Appel, Claude Bellegarde, Renato Birolli, Mark Boyle, Aldo Brizzi, Peter Brüning, Samuel Buri, Cheval-Bertrand, William Crozier, Horia Damian, Giuseppe De Gregorio, Piero Dorazio, François Dufrêne, Ernst Faesi, Luis Feito , Gianfranco Ferroni, Franco Francese, Josep Guinovart, Patrick Hughes, Nikos Kessanlis, Peter Klasen, André Marfaing, Mattia Moreni, Ennio Morlotti, Edo Murtic, Achille Perilli, Gianni Pisani, Mauro Reggiani, Sergio Romiti, Piero Ruggeri, Emilio Scanavino, Mario Schifano, Gerard Schneider, Giacomo Soffiantino, Antoni Tàpies, Fred Thieler, Eugenio Tomiolo, Guido Trentini, Emilio Vedova, Aat Verhoog, Vittorio Viviani, Theodor Werner.
