Sixty years ago, between the summer and autumn of 1957, the Soviet Union launched a competition with the United States that would go down in history as the Space Race: the intercontinental ballistic missile R-7 Semyorka SS-6 Sapwood, launched on 21 August, was the first vehicle to enter the cosmic void, while on 4 October the Sputnik 1 became the first artificial satellite sent into orbit around the earth. Finally, on 3 November 1957, with Sputnik 2, the first living being was sent into space: Kudryavka (Laika), a little dog sacrificed for science who died during the journey. It was the beginning of a dream, a physical and imaginary path that would lead humanity to the frontiers of knowledge.
The United States lagged behind, entering the contest only on 31 January 1958 with the launch of their first artificial satellite, the Explorer 1, but it would again be the Soviet Union that reached another important milestone when, on 12 April 1961, with the Vostok 1 mission, it sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit, the first man in space. As is well known, America would have to wait until 20 July 1969 for its revenge, with Apollo 11 and the moon walk of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but the excitement of discovering what lay beyond the atmosphere, together with the tensions between the two superpowers and the fears of a nuclear war, was a powerful stimulus for many artists engaged, after the end of the Second World War, in the renewal of the avant-garde.
Space played a fundamental role, all the more so since the entry into the extra-atmospheric dimension had been postulated in the 1930s by the Futurist signatories of the Manifesto of Aeropainting. Among the most significant were the Perugian Gerardo Dottori, intent on unveiling the landscape suggestions of aeroplane views, and the Modenese Enrico Prampolini, active in Rome since 1913, creator of a cosmic-aeropictorial approach, advocating the surpassing of earthly limits as a premise for entering the era of the 'full aerial sensibility' and a thrust towards the 'latent images of a new world of cosmic realities' (from Prampolini's manifesto, Aeropittura e superamento terrestre, October-November 1931). Above all, this last interpretation had been responsible for the maturing of Lucio Fontana who, in 1939, at the age of forty, took part in the Futurist Aeroceramics exhibition at Albisola Marittima, on which occasion Marinetti likened him to Prampolini as an exponent of the cosmic language.
Having come through the difficult phase of the war, the Spatialism of the Argentine artist thus opened up the relationship between art and science, referring in particular to a metaphysical sensibility bent on probing the unresolved mysteries of man. In the meantime Italy too inaugurated its own scientific programme, sending the San Marco 1 into the Cosmos (15 December 1964) and ranking as the fourth nation in the world, after the Soviet Union, the United States and Canada, to enter the space age. The launch was made possible thanks to the 'lift' offered by the USA, who carried the satellite aboard one of their Scout vehicles (four more would follow, up to 1988).
Man had now crossed the earthly threshold and become a pioneer of space, so creative spirits could imagine new worlds and new navigators, shifting the epic of Ulysses from the sea to the universe. From 1966, when it was devised by Gene Roddenberry, the USS Enterprise probed the sidereal spaces, becoming a symbol of the new era, while two years later Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick imagined a true 'space odyssey' ending with Dr David Bowman drawn in by a mysterious black monolith: a step towards the unknown that expressed that same sense of existential bewilderment voiced in parallel by Fontana with his famous Tagli.

Alessandro Bruschetti: Purilumetria

From the figurative arts to literature, from cinema to music, around the middle of the 1960s artists of every kind were swept up by this revolution, which quickly spread on a planetary scale. Thanks to Aeropainting, the Umbria of Gerardo Dottori played a part of its own: the first among the Futurists to interpret flight as an artistic possibility, Dottori had never bound himself directly to cosmic themes, yet his aptitude for shifting the point of view from the earth to the sky marked him out as a poet of the infinite projected towards what lies beyond the atmosphere.
This artist, in particular, is a point of reference for the new generations who, around the early 1930s, looked to Futurism. Among them the closest is Alessandro Bruschetti, born in Perugia in 1910 and active in the movement from 1932. For him the Futurist experience lasted little more than a decade, ending with the death of Marinetti in 1944, but a new turn came precisely from space and from the opaque black-and-white images spread through the media. For if as a movement Futurism no longer existed, the same could not be said of its theoretical premises.
In the 1930s Bruschetti still painted in the Dottori manner, but between 1957 and 1958 he began to formulate the principles of Purilumetria, a term he coined himself with the meaning of purity of light through geometry. The starting point is still the Futurist lesson, discernible in the closeness to Giacomo Balla's Compenetrazioni iridescenti and in the insertion of metallic aluminium elements that recall the mechanisms of the Complessi plastici. It is not merely a matter of reflecting on the abstract properties of light, but of drawing inspiration from cosmic objects floating in sidereal settings and from forms devised by man: astral vehicles, meteoric fireballs or artificial satellites. Space instils in the artist a sense of purity, prompting him to make paintings in which mechanical and aeropictorial suggestions can be detected, where the Cosmos, the region of future explorations, is understood spiritually as the goal of a chosen humanity. In Bruschetti's hyperuranian universe regular and irregular geometric forms drift: spheres, parallelepipeds, pyramids, cones, a mysterious world of objects in free movement in which cosmic purity is reflected in the smoothness of the space machines. In the 1970s the Purilumetric works take on depth, imagining vehicles that carry the knowledge of man into the void, and this does not seem accidental if we recall that on 5 September 1977 NASA sent the Voyager 1 into space, still travelling today beyond the confines of the solar system, carrying inside it the information of the human race: a seed launched towards the infinite, the total union of science, art and faith, which the artist grasped to perfection, carrying his painting towards Purilumetric abstractions inspired by the sacred that brought his intense experience of art and life to an early close in 1980.

Bruno Orfei: Perugia-Houston and the Dance of the Cosmonauts

Bruschetti's is a step shared by other Futurists of his generation, such as the Marchigian Sante Monachesi, creator of the Agrà movement (an allusion to the concept of 'agravitationality'), or Enzo Benedetto, who in 1930 had published the novel Viaggio al pianeta Marte. Different, instead, is the case of another Perugian artist: Bruno Orfei, far younger than Bruschetti and therefore distant from Futurist coordinates.
Born in 1926, he began his artistic activity in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, adhering to the neo-cubist language (like him, other young artists including Enzo Rossi, Manlio Bacosi, Enzo Brunori and Romeo Mancini) and showing himself attentive to the tendencies of his time. On reaching the decade of the Sixties he too was overwhelmed by the excitement for the conquests of space, and from 1965 he made bronze sculptures inspired by the forms of astronauts: thread-like bodies suspended in space and floating in an 'agravitational' dimension, slender figures, almost alien, rendered in graceful poses as in a dance. Playing in a metaphorical and allusive key, Orfei conveys the sense of floating experienced by the human being outside the earth's atmosphere, and in parallel he experiments with the use of metallic materials in two-dimensional works worked in relief that imitate, in form and colour, the lunar surfaces.
These works remained unpublished until 1968 when, setting poetic production alongside artistic production, he published a booklet of about forty pages dedicated to the 'pioneers of space', containing some of his aphorisms placed next to reproductions of the works. With genuine scenographic effects the artist positions the thread-like sculptures of the astronauts in front of the bas-reliefs, imitating the condition of cosmonauts orbiting in front of the satellite. A tribute to the courage of the new explorers that Orfei made concrete in the spring of 1969 by sending the booklet to NASA and receiving, in May, two months before the historic moon landing, two letters of thanks: one from James A. Lovell, commander in 1970 of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, the other from Wernher von Braun, the historic German scientist and engineer at the head of the United States space programme, both grateful to the artist for his particular interpretation of the astronauts.
Orfei's attention to the conquests of space then moved towards the making of multi-material works entitled Esperimento K, referring to the metallic materials of the satellites, but it is above all through the hypothetical definition of a humanity of the future that the artist pursued these suggestions. Starting from the mid-1960s and reaching well beyond the Eighties, he imagined a new humanity depicted through alien canons that anticipate, in certain respects, the physical conformation devised by Carlo Rambaldi in 1982 for his E.T.: it is the series entitled Umanità 3000, comprising works not limited to the two-dimensionality of the painting but also rendered in sculptural forms, at times monumental, as in the case of the series of statues placed in front of the Perugia sports arena, Le Grandi Madri, which on the one hand draw on the collective imagery of the alien being, and on the other resemble ancient Moai set down by some remote civilisation to bear witness to a mythical past.

Iron, Bones and Imagination: the Experience of Brajo Fuso and Maria Pistone

Less long-lived, but no less interesting, are the parallel experiences of Brajo Fuso and Maria Pistone, artists far apart in training and research, who between 1967 and 1969 took delight in experimenting with multi-material works inspired by the Cosmos and the Moon.
Born in Perugia in 1899, Brajo Fuso was driven by a marked bent for invention. Enlisted as a medical officer during the Second World War, he was caught up in a clash and suffered wounds that forced his return to Perugia and a consequent long convalescence at home. It is in this phase that, urged on by his wife Bettina, an artist of long experience, he began to practise painting, at first in a traditional way and later turning to material experimentation. His way of working is free, distant from linguistic demands and prone to contaminations, aimed at the recovery of discarded objects and given over to the making of genuine new worlds: artificial beings composed of scraps of sheet metal, old disused engine parts, nets, pieces of wood, gears and any element he had to hand. It is not simply a matter of assembling, but of generating unprecedented realities, describing them through word games rich in neologisms, and in this inventive process, between 1966 and 1967, he made some works inspired by the universe entitled Era cosmica.
Using metal wire, he traces orbits of concentric and spiral course on the surface of the support painted black, grafting onto it artefacts related to the shape of the stars. These are the elements of his art: iron and imagination, a playful aspect through which to relate to the work of art by playing with materials and inventing solutions, and although at those dates man had not yet set foot on the Moon, the mere orbiting around the globe leads Fuso to imagine abstract solutions that recall, in certain cases, the concentric motions painted by some of his contemporaries such as Roberto Crippa, or the aeropictorial experiences of his fellow Umbrians Dottori and Bruschetti. The continual American missions, however, make the conquest of space ever more concrete, and in December 1968, with Apollo 8, the cosmonauts Frank Borman, William A. Anders and Jim Lovell make an orbit around the Moon, becoming the first human beings to see with their own eyes the hidden side of the satellite. Already in 1959 the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 had photographed that vast area full of impact craters, but ten years on the media resonance of the event is so strong as to captivate millions of people. Exploiting the technique used for the Favocromi, works made by immersing pieces of plastic tubing in polyurethane, Fuso revisits the suggestion of those astronauts with a work entitled La Luna vista da lassù. And indeed the surface rendering of the image has nothing to do with the usual conformation visible from the Earth, since the artist presents a surface entirely covered with holes, just as the dark side of the Moon appears. The work remains a unique case, but being made in 1969 it falls in the year of the historic moon landing, a way for the artist to dream and bear witness to the great wonder at an epochal conquest.
And it is precisely to the moon landings, again between 1967 and 1969, that the painter Maria Pistone devotes a series of works unique of their kind. Born in 1913 in Catania and trained in Milan at the Academy of Fine Arts with Achille Funi and Carlo Carrà, but settled in Perugia from 1946 after her marriage to Sergio Cecchini, her painting is tied to figuration, enriched by some hints of metaphysics and surrealism that over the years push her towards evocative dreamlike settings.

At the start of 1967, what until then had been characterised as a traditional language undergoes a sudden turn towards contemporary research, coming to represent that astonishing world that reaches the Earth through the media. She begins the series of the Allunaggi, multi-material works inspired by the lunar surface, from which she takes up the characteristic pitting of craters. The artist shows an effective capacity for interpretative analysis, enriched by experiences outside Umbria of which she must certainly have been aware, first among them Fontana, whose Spatialism matured from 1946, precisely when Pistone moved from Milan to Perugia, but which she could certainly have seen through exhibitions and publications. Even more pertinent seems the comparison with the Superfici lunari of Giulio Turcato, but the painter's originality stands out above all in her use of unusual materials such as animal bones and ossobuchi, the latter used for their likeness to the shape of lunar craters. In some cases the works present evocative colourings, as if to suggest gaseous agglomerations that call to mind cosmic mists, but always showing on the ground these particular surface features. A study that Pistone also combines with plastic materials with which to perform a sort of surface dripping, and through which she also makes delicate works on paper where the use of bones is replaced by filamentous pictorial material.
For her, as for Fuso, it is a brief window of time that has its peak in the excitement for the landing of Apollo 11, but it remains all the same an original and significant page, testifying to the attention that even in Umbria was paid, on the artistic level, to historical events concerning two nations in the first place, but more broadly the entire world, and which half a century on still astonishes.

Andrea Baffoni is an art historian and critic. Director of the magazine Contemporart (Modena), he obtained his doctorate in the History of Contemporary Art at the University of Perugia. A member of the Gerardo Dottori Archive, essayist and curator, in 2015 he published the volume Contro ogni reazione. Enrico Prampolini teorico e promotore artistico, Lantana, Rome.