Tancredi was the only artist, after Jackson Pollock, with whom Peggy Guggenheim enters into a contract, promoting his work, making it known to major overseas museums and collectors and organizing some exhibitions, such as the one in 1954 at Palazzo Venier dei Lions. After more than sixty years, therefore, the artist returns as the undisputed star of the Guggenheim Collection with an extraordinary selection of works, which reconstruct in an intimate and capillary way, between creative production and irrepressible emotionality, the short but dazzling parable of this great interpreter of post-war art.
Starting from rare early trials of portraits and self-portraits and from the first experiments on paper of 1950-51, the first part of the exhibition documents the purely abstract research, linked to the fragmentation of the sign, carried out by the artist from Feltre over the the 50s, a period which marks the crucial encounter with Peggy, of whom he becomes a protégé, and which leads him to have his own studio in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. This significant link is documented by the large number of works on display, belonging to the Venetian museum. The exhibition also represents the return to Italy of a very precious selection of works donated by the patron to some famous American museums: for the first time since Peggy's time, masterpieces such as Primavera, from the MoMA in New York and Spazio, Water, Nature, Entertainment, now in the Brooklyn Museum. The great retrospective does not fail to document the artistic production of the 60s, a moment of crisis and complete revision of his own painting, to which Tancredi wants to give an existential and political meaning. And this is how the vein of controversy and tension of those Cold War years emerge in the title of the exhibition "My weapon against the atomic bomb is a blade of grass", a phrase with which Tancredi responds to the innumerable conflicts of the time, from Vietnam to the war in Algeria, to the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. The three paintings from the Hiroshima series (1962) are on display from this fundamental moment in his artistic career.
The final part of the exhibition is dedicated to the collage-paintings executed between 1962 and 1963, the so-called village diaries and 101% painted flowers by me and others, which can rightly be defined as the true revelation of this retrospective and which are to be considered examples of exceptional creative vigor and dramatic euphoria. It is these works that close the extraordinary path, ingenious and unruly, of Tancredi's painting dedicated to nature and man. Tancredi died in 1964 at the age of just 37, very young and ready to enter, as Dino Buzzati wrote, the "myth of Tancredi".
My weapon against the nuke is a blade of grass.
Tancred. A retrospective
Until March 13 2017
Edited by Luca Massimo Barbero
