A Little Lexicon for Giorgio Maddoli

Active on the Umbrian and national scene, Giorgio Maddoli, after his untimely death in 1978, has been studied and celebrated in various settings. In recent years in particular, the spotlight of a comprehensive historiographical assessment has been turned on him, with exhibitions such as "L'intima discrezione della pittura". Giorgio Maddoli (1916-1978)[1], curated by Francesco Federico Mancini, on the occasion of an important donation by his daughters Cristina and Chiara to the Museo di Palazzo Baldeschi al Corso. A few months ago, in April, the Regional Council of Tuscany commemorated him in Florence, with an exhibition at Palazzo Bastogi[2].
The aim here is to attempt to bring into focus some of the critical knots of his development, marked out according to the principal entries of a plausible personal "dictionary", and likewise to attempt a possible contextual placement in relation to protagonists and supporting figures of the contemporary Umbrian debate and to certain elements of the contemporary Western debate.

MODERNISM

Recently, abroad, a colleague asked me how Modernismo is translated into Italian (referring to the Catalan kind). What is called that there corresponds more or less to the season that in Italy is usually named Liberty, whereas the word modernismo came into vogue, as an almost literal calque from English and in particular from American specialist literature, to designate the avant-gardes and their twentieth-century tradition up to its definitive overcoming (between antimodernism and postmodernism, precisely, as in the title of a famous volume[3]). It would certainly be worth devoting a specific study to this terminology, which has become in some respects confused, from the moment when this word spread in our debate too, perhaps without an adequate and shared theoretical reflection. It so happens that it has been absorbed, legitimately and rightly I believe, but at times mechanically, taken wholesale from another cultural situation.
Perhaps, then, it is not entirely by chance that the misunderstanding (not a play on words) the title might generate.
Before the most recent developments and the subsumption into the debate of the term modernism, as it is now commonly understood in the art world on this side of the ocean and beyond, the word in Italian designated above all a religious and cultural movement between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is to that we refer here.
The history of words is curious and at times ironic.
Maddoli, who did not wish to be a modernist (in the current sense) in art, was instead close to one of the modernist figures of the early century, and it is postulated here that this experience was decisive for him.
Maddoli the modernist, precisely.
Toward the end of the Thirties, Perugia is a city crossed by manifold contradictions, in which modernization coexists with the repression of the regime. In that covertly fervid setting, while the dictatorship tightens its grip and proclaims the racial laws, experiences of a different sign continue to bear fruit; others are born, wellspring-like, or are grafted onto it, in turn creating new roots for genealogies to come.
Giorgio Maddoli is around twenty: he was born in 1916. His Catholic faith, which already anchors his existence, has met a teacher: Monsignor Luigi Piastrelli. It is a decisive encounter, I believe for his art as well, certainly for his culture and his religiosity.
He was, moreover, a figure of great depth: coming from the experience of Catholic Modernism, to which he had adhered very young, he had just as soon known the harshness of the marginalization that the pontiff of the time had reserved for that intellectual and spiritual adventure. Only many years later would the reflections of Piastrelli and his companions, among them Fracassini himself, be, so to speak, rehabilitated, up to the important moment lived within the conciliar sphere and in particular later under the pontificate of Paul VI.
It had in any case been a season of immeasurable significance for Italian and above all Umbrian religiosity, as Francesco Di Pilla well illuminated, many years ago, in his attentive evocation of those events[4]. Piastrelli, shortly afterward, would become parish priest at the Church of Sant'Agata, at the top of the street of the same name, where it opens into Via dei Priori, and from there he would return as a protagonist of Umbrian cultural life, among other things promoting the Perugia section of the FUCI, Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana. In the latter he had in fact been active since the Twenties, as ecclesial secretary, and had then continued his closeness, in particular with Giovan Battista Montini, precisely the future Paul VI, now recently canonized.
Maddoli joined the FUCI, taking part also in the Roman proceedings, and was then an important figure of the Perugia section, in which he involved his friend and contemporary, the painter Enzo Rossi. It was, for both, a decisive choice, parallel to their first autonomous steps on the art scene: the two young friends are present in Terni at the VIII Sindacale of 1938[5]. To weld together faith and culture, in their specific case faith and art, was perhaps the decisive event of an entire existence. Whatever culturalist residue might remain in an artistic tradition learned from canonical sources, between training at the Istituto d'Arte and at the Accademia di Belle Arti, was reabsorbed into a fully and comprehensively sacred perspective. Whatever contingent and individual residue might remain in a faith lived as a merely personal dimension, in the narrowness of a private questionability, was innervated into a public and general, social perspective; whatever supernaturalist, so to speak, or even folkloric residue might remain in certain aspects of religion or of worship was tested against a severe critique, scientific and cultural as well.
Rossi's tormented inquiry, which seeks the nexus between his Catholic faith and the problems of modern art "and life in its totality" and finds it in the sense of space and in the truth of objects in pictorial language[6], is found again in Maddoli, in whom it becomes exemplary in the landscapes and in general in a painting that is comprehensively sacred. Painting becomes an act of prayer. Yet it seems to me that, among the chords of Umbrian religiosity, it is not the chord of mysticism that his painting sounds. Rational investigation, a critical verification (in a certain, paradoxically secular way), an intellectual rigor that finds in the instruments of drawing its most suitable means, all distinctive characters of his art, are closer to philosophy (or to philology) than to mysticism. See, for a fitting comparison, what has recently been written by Flavio Cuniberto[7] on the landscape traversed by Saint Francis (and on its Edenic nature); a landscape different, it seems to me, from Maddoli's.
In this sense a counterpart that is almost a double could be Capitini's religiosity.
Maddoli's deep and intense faith, though it may at times veer toward mysticism, is substantially rigorous and critical, steeped in speculative and rational elements. Indeed, though understated, a mental and speculative element is always present in his works, and it distances them evenhandedly both from the overtly ideological instances that seem to inform certain village pictures in the Thirties, as Michele Dantini[8] suggests on a recent occasion devoted to Francalancia, ascribable to a ruralism that was on the contrary probably foreign to our artist, and from magical and ultimately, precisely, mystical instances.
Close, instead, though in the diversity of linguistic and historical choices, as will be said, to Enzo Rossi's operation, and in some respects specular and interconnected with that of Romeo Mancini.
At least as a metaphor, one may speak of a Maddoli the modernist, in the sense precisely of a deep and constitutive filiation from that affair, through the direct channel of Luigi Piastrelli and the indirect channel of the world of the FUCI.

TRADITION

Of that kind, one might say, was his whole relationship with tradition.
That word was certainly important to him. It has been noted by almost all his exegetes, and rightly so, that he moved in the furrow of tradition: a tradition brought up to date, learnedly relived and consciously continued. It must on the other hand be stressed that, in times of appeals to tradition in even their most bombastic forms, it was, in his vocabulary, a word genetically free of rhetoric and opportunism, alien, for example, in every one of its phases, to any nationalistic spirit. Not the tradition of the leaders, in short, nor that of the nation. It is therefore a relationship with tradition as a high genealogy, but not always with the most undisputed and safe one. Tradition was in fact never for Maddoli a comfort zone. Convinced though he was within the order of the fathers, he decided, with a deliberate move and without polemical vis, not to abandon it.
Not to abandon it, stubbornly and perhaps ironically, in an understated reversal of more widespread positions, or of those more rooted at the time, on the one hand; on the other, in the immovable conviction of a possible linguistic innovation from within, like revising the sacred texts with the instruments of philological criticism, if the modernist parallel be permitted.

AVANT-GARDES (MODERNISM/2)

If on the local level his rejection of the avant-gardes is an element to be paired with the figure of the artist integrated into the social fabric, with a clear and recognized role (though it is interesting to note that he always set alongside it that of the intellectual active also in cultural organization and agitation and in the world of the school), an integration that the young Umberto Raponi could not fathom, as recalled in a moving remembrance[9], on the general level that rejection was instead also the rejection of a new type of artist.
In this direction one must frame an element evoked, in the aftermath of the painter's untimely death, by a sensitive critic of his, Marcello Camillucci[10], who speaks of a Maddoli far from existential torment. Beyond questions of temperament, it was really a matter of placing oneself consciously within a different, and in part opposite, academic tradition and genealogy from a status of the artist that, already heir to elements of Romanticism, he was not romantic, championed a figure of the accursed poet, of the tormented genius. That figure had been taken up, at times malgré soi, by the avant-garde artists, who had founded in the twentieth century a new tradition, become in some measure canonical. Maddoli acts from the outset in a different climate, and in a later time, permeated by the so-called return to order. Yet his choice of field will remain coherent, even when, in the Forties, the option had to be renewed, in the face of the spread of a post-avant-garde creed: see his attitude toward post-Cubism, which arrives by many routes in the city, around and above all in the aftermath of the war years. That is, in the face of the updating on the avant-gardes postulated in Italy by the Venice Biennale of 1948, a pivotal year for Maddoli too, in fact. And in general toward the Italian post-Cubist elaboration, moreover diffused at first also in a left-wing ideological key; then, precisely from 1948, things will change. One must certainly not think of a total linguistic closure or a deliberate impermeability with respect to the great conquests of the avant-gardes. Giorgio in fact lets certain Cubist stylistic features filter into his figurative grammar, drawn precisely from the post-Cubist koiné of the Italian second postwar period, but relived and made his own in the clarity and limpidity of forms that was peculiar to him. See the resumption, even late, in some of his finest works, of certain broken lines or of the triangular decomposition of space, means directed toward a profoundly draftsmanly and graphic linearism that is a fundamental hallmark of his working, but directed also toward an elliptical and angular construction of space, never orthogonal in him, which will return in exemplary fashion at the moment when, in sacred works, he wishes to preach a space different from the purely human dimension, (trans)humanly ascensional as in the Getsemani (1957), or when he takes up elements of Futurist dynamism, as observed by Francesco Federico Mancini[11] for the ascending linearism of Il grande casolare (1953).

For the latter, in particular, one may perhaps specify an influence of Dottori's Incendio-città. To Picasso, on the other hand, he had looked with great attention, fishing also in pre- (and elsewhere proto-) Cubist waters, already at the turn of the fourth and fifth decades: he presents, in fact, at the IX Sindacale of 1942 in Perugia a Visitazione of primitivist accents, nourished by the Picasso of the Blue Period. To him he would turn again more than once, in my view, and often precisely in the specific sense of that extraordinary season, taking up its intensely human atmospheres, the inquiry among the poor[12] and the marginalized, indeed the very same color range: a distant echo even in the extraordinary portrait of the Vecchio, 1950.

One may perhaps postulate that there was, later as well, an original and politely dissident convergence with socialist realism, which, born under the tutelary deity of Picasso, in the Guernica sense, had then flowed into a plainly figurative and deliberately anti-avant-garde language.

ARTIST

Giorgio Maddoli would reaffirm his choice of field in the light of the neo-avant-garde developments of the Fifties and Sixties, rejecting the iconography, photographed by Namuth[13], of art as experience[14], and in some respects as Dionysian rite[15], of a Jackson Pollock at work. That new image sanctioned in a new, or further deepened, way this figure of the artist, making it the emblem of the American avant-garde artist.
The artist embodied by Maddoli, beyond elements of temperament, is an artist whose status is recognized and integrated in society. He is precisely, as was said, the artist of the academic tradition, as preached before, or beyond, the crisis of that status and of that institution in the Romantic and then avant-garde sphere. Contradictorily, the American developments from Pollock onward would consist in a sort of reintegration, under the false guise of a totally opposite category, one moreover not lacking concrete elements of tragic existential reality[16]. The individuals were apocalyptic, but the use, also in terms of power and of more or less soft inculturation, that was made of their art established an integration (at times a posteriori) of this new role in the shadow of geopolitical, social and self-representational needs, or at least of cultural nation-building[17]. Hence, even if paradoxically, the new American accursed artist of the Forties, the Fifties, and beyond, is (or rather would very soon be) integrated and functional to the social system as well as to cultural propaganda.
Maddoli's real integration into his own, albeit piccolo, mondo was instead concrete and historical, but also, and this is important, individually enacted and not other-directed, just as sincere was his anchorage to a heuristic vision of a religious kind, firmly foundational for his outlook. In this sense, what might seem a lagging behind, or at any rate a withdrawal from certain terms of the debate, was instead perhaps, lucidly, insofar as some processes are better seen from afar, a conscious strategy of opposition and resistance, at the very least a deeply convinced non-adherence, a legitimate and free dissent.

MASTER (MASTERS)

Counterparts of one another, Maddoli and Checchi, his master, were in this specularly in accord. Both alien to the avant-garde fever, both opponents of that way of conceiving the artist; and consider that the umbrageous Checchi, who left us of himself, among much else, the Autoritratto dei piatti rotti, was anything but serene, while the often motionless landscapes of Maddoli, and the concordant testimonies concerning him, suggest otherwise. If Checchi skirted, in his Munich sojourn and in the related memories scattered through his production, the Expressionist experience, then rejecting it, or moving beyond it without forgetting it, in a different choice, of greater dialogue with tradition, Maddoli found before him precisely the watershed of post-Cubism and of the non-figurative paths, notably in the postwar years, and then, between the Fifties and Sixties, the crossroads of Art Informel and the definitive conceptual split.
The relationship with Arturo Checchi was constitutive: the painter took his diploma at the Accademia di Belle Arti in 1940. Shortly before (from 1939) Gerardo Dottori had become its director, while at the same time Checchi himself moved to Brera, after dominating since 1925, and leaving a very deep mark on, the chair of Painting in Perugia. It is significant to observe that, according to the testimony of his daughter Cristina herself[18], the pupil was not overly fond of Checchi, who had, it seems, the power to irritate him with a manner too assertive and little inclined to the teaching of art as a dialectic between generations and expressive options. Significantly, the only violent passion recorded of the mild painter. Nor should it cause undue surprise: too distant and too close, the two, to be able to love each other, or to ignore each other.
Checchi's expressive intensity was nonetheless not without consequences in Maddoli's painting, more pacified, certainly, but no less vibrant. Even the subjects seem at times to emulate, or to answer the challenge of, Checchi's subjects, in a process that moreover soon becomes one between equals: see the beautiful Letture (both 1940) or the marvelous portraits (see, among many: Ritratto di Angela, 1945; Chiara con la palla, 1952; Cristina con il fiocco azzurro, 1956).

A true confrontation can then be discerned in Nonna Ginevra, 1943, which vies with Cecchi's Madre of 1939, and so again, at least until 1948, in other domestic scenes, chromatically and affectively charged. Certainly, if both were extraordinary draftsmen, Maddoli's drawing seems to master the real with a rigor and a precision (Torre degli Sciri, 1966; Via Vincioli, Perugia, 1948), I would say also with a firmness and serenity, precluded to Checchi's clear and incisive, yet always intimately anguished, line.

Arturo, tormented and material, is more sumptuous and sensual, between seventeenth-century glimmers and Expressionist reminiscences; Giorgio, logical and sparing, is more chaste. Yet the Perugian painter transforms, without eluding or dissolving it, the master's tormented material density and turns its palette in the light of an Umbrian en plein air. He debates, subjecting it to strict verification, its relationship with tradition, which he steers in the light of Carrà's teaching (La torre, 1953; Marina adriatica tenda bianca, 1955), even within the shared Cézannian and post-Cézannian matrix. He rethinks in particular, I believe, certain experiences, between post-Cézannian and proto-avant-garde, above all preceding Cubism: see a certain way of handling the lights and volumes of the landscapes at L'Estaque, between Cézanne's prototype and the Case of Georges Braque (Baracche, 1947). But he remains alien to the problem of space in the sense in which it torments Enzo Rossi and, in a different way, Checchi himself; or better: Giorgio Maddoli resolves it in the meridian light and in the Umbrian landscape, in a constitutive relationship with the specificity of the territory and with nature.

Though hardly obvious, a companion more than a counterpart is in this sense Dottori, who recovers an authentic inspiration after his return to Perugia. And precisely in an archetypal and auroral vision of the Umbrian landscape, he would in turn inspire, by filiation or by contrast, new developments. Dottori, for whom I have elsewhere[19] had occasion to postulate a symbolic path between the fourth and fifth decades, knows, from the mid-Forties, an acme of this phase of his, gathering up, even while recovering the Futurist decomposition, oneiric meanings and a metaphysical afflatus, the consequential development of the spiritualizing climate of 1942, the year in which he had transfigured the lake into a primigenial όmfalos. Both, however, remained far from a landscape tied more or less programmatically (or at any rate traceable) to the rural ideologies of Fascism, recently brought into the discussion[20] . And it will suffice, for example, to recall that in Maddoli's production the human figure is almost always absent.
Another master was Aldo Pascucci, to whom two elements important also for his future can be traced. Steeped in Surrealist and oneiric echoes in his production of the Forties, he may also have been the intermediary, or at least a co-participant, of a broadly Surrealist situation that in Enzo Rossi is declined in perhaps Dalinian atmospheres. That situation was certainly in part mediated by the Roman milieu, above all that of La Cometa, while it is surely to the direct encounter with that climate, declined in multiple senses, and with the specific and flagrant lesson of Mafai in particular, an encounter that matured with the Premio Perugia, and even earlier with the Galleria Nuova, that one owes the chromatically warm and intimate accent found in interiors and still lifes of great mastery from the end of the Forties: Il libro, il fiore, 1947. Yet Pascucci's cultivated teaching was by no means secondary.

LANDSCAPE (and NATURE)

"Once the Istituto d'Arte was over, our enterprise as painters began, and this too we began together, not so much in the Academy as by going out to paint the landscape under the guidance of our dearest engraving teacher, Prof. Aldo Pascucci", writes Enzo Rossi. Decisive, then, appears the choice of the three artists to leave the classrooms and studios and go into the open air, into nature. From then on, the painter recalls, he and Pascucci began to question themselves on the problem of space and of modern art, but all together they felt the problem of a unitary vision, for which Maddoli found the answer: "In particular, at that moment, painting the landscape was decisive for Giorgio", Rossi continues (cf. Paesaggio umbro, 1945).

It will not be out of place, then, to cite the "Georgica cristiana" of which Camillucci spoke in his day[21]. It was a choice, I wish to stress, of ethical and political value as well, within a poetics made of anti-rhetoric, which suggested the study, also in the etymological sense, of the beauty of places, of the lesson of the landscape. A cogent comparison must in my view also be established, for linguistic and substantive reasons, with Giorgio Morandi, and in particular with his landscapes of the sixth decade, in which the customary Morandian silence seems to congeal in certain deep shadows or in certain outlines of houses. (Paesaggio con albero, 1964).
The difference should moreover be underlined between the various options that matured in those decades between Umbria and Rome around similar themes. Maddoli's landscape, that is, nature anthropized and civil, friendly but lyrically distant, motionless and deserted, intellectual and purified, free of every contingency, amended even of human presence, is a different path from the incarnate space of exact topography, in praise of the cosmic order, of Rossi, and even more distant from the poetics of color, respectively, of Enzo Brunori, with his library of trees, at once a visual and a political instance, and of Vittoria Lippi, with her existential and introspective inward turning within the work, or again, widening the field, of Renato Birolli. But these were in any case operations carried out on the basis of a common platform, and albeit in different ways they posed, with the instruments proper to the making of art, an incipient ecological problem, all the more precious and timely at the crossroads before which the country, and the planet, stood.
His path was, according to Enzo Rossi, a "continuous, very long, patient painting from life (…), Giorgio "was a man of active, continuous and free patience…and this led him to a true seeing of the landscape in a well-defined revelation of its existential beauty as an aspect of the truth of the work of God; a revelation that confirmed him in artistic truth and religious faith for his whole life"[22].

REALISM

He was, on the other hand, by no means insensitive to the many questions that inflamed the sociopolitical debate of those years, posing for himself as well, in particular, the problem of realism.
Around 1948 a thick black contour line surfaces in his painting, probably derived from Rouault, as rightly indicated by Francesco Federico Mancini[23]. A new stylistic entry that interweaves with the recurrence of certain Checchian popular portraits, reread, also in an ethical-political key, in the light of Romeo Mancini's realist dernier cri. See also the Vecchio, 1948, between a warm palette, intents that are also social, and a religious intention, a human attentiveness, a psychological penetration that constitute his truest hallmark. An exact counterpoint to the expunging of the human figure from the landscape, the subject returns in the portraits, a genre he practiced with superb results, a sign of his observation of the real also in a psychological and historical-social sense, as well as of a remarkable introspective capacity. See the splendid Autoritratto with the beret of 1951.
The filtered influence of the post-Cubist language of the postwar years emerges, pertinently, on occasions of history painting: see the fine Veglia del partigiano of 1955. The dialogue with Mancini and with Guttuso-like instances is patent here (cf. also Il pescatore, 1961).

THE SACRED

All his painting, as has already been said, was sacred. Alongside this there was also, though not as frequent as one might expect, a punctual and constant presence on the specific front of sacred art (…E si fece buio…, 1961) and of ecclesial decoration, for which a dedicated Umbrian itinerary could be traced, from the Santa Rita of 1960 for the Church of Sant'Agostino to the Via Crucis of Santa Maria del Colle in Perugia, of 1964, to the stained-glass window with the Beato Ugolino for Gualdo Cattaneo, also of 1960, to the Sant'Omobono Tucenghi for the Oratorio dei Filippini in Perugia, of 1966[24]).
Equally, if not more, important was the role he played in cultural organization, first with the UCAI exhibitions, in the postwar period. The Unione Cattolica Artisti Italiani reaffirmed the interweaving of faith and art that various propulsive instances or secularizing tendencies sought to undo. The action carried forward by Maddoli was, for that matter, intelligently ecumenical, and the exhibitions organized were never strictly confessional affairs. It is a salient detail for understanding the tenor and the breadth of his vision, of his initiatives, of his influence, not flaunted but deep, and intense, despite too brief a life, in the Perugian situation. Later, in collaboration with Father Antonio Cistellini, he was active in the organization of an important event, the Mostre Nazionali d'Arte Sacra, which he curated for eighteen editions from 1951 to 1973[25]. A legacy now neglected, and one that perhaps calls for further reflection, prompting us to consider also the current state of that specific line of research.
I would like to reconnect to the sacred, and thus to the category of faith, for the evangelical spirit that I believe sustained it, his commitment to the education of the young, to whom he transmitted, to take up the words of Piergiorgio Giacché's remembrance, "freedom taught by contagion, from master to pupil"[26].

BEING IN TIME

He was reserved, as has been said, to the point of appearing even extraneous to the contemporary debate. Yet in those years a fracture is created, painful and yet willed, between the officialdom of research, at times flattened onto the international debate, and an extremely variegated fabric, above all pictorial, which rejects, or excludes itself from, that debate. It is a deep trace also in the recent history of Umbria, and of the city. Deep and ambiguous: it moves in fact along the thread of an existential and artistic authenticity which, when lucid and well motivated, flows into the poetic resilience of a Maddoli, into the sufferingly loved matter of a Checchi, into the political value of the poetics of color of a Brunori or the introspective inquiry within color of a Lippi, into the religiously motivated inquiry into space of a Rossi, into the historicist attention, not seldom turned to fantastic subversion, of Mancini; and many others still could be cited. And in so doing it vivifies, in an authentic variety of positions, far removed from centralisms and impositions of any kind, a true and broad dialectic. (Conversely, where it is a matter of ideological positioning or sterile polemic, withdrawing from the debate can be an unfruitful turning in on oneself.)

BEING OUTSIDE TIME

"The pliable iron wire of drawing (…) leads the material to the immaterial", writes Alfredo De Poi[27]. A passage possible only within a choice closely watched over on the linguistic and compositional plane. Essentiality was a profoundly Maddolian category: everything is simplified in a philosophical reduction to the elements. There is a sort of archetypal (one might say Platonic) idea of the hut, of the house, of the haystack (cf. Il capanno rosso, 1955).

The road indicated first by Cézanne and then by Braque (in part by Picasso) at L'Estaque is carried forward in another direction, with Carrà as traveling companion, but here, beyond physics, there is theology.
Time is wrapped in silence, denied in its becoming, although its cyclical nature is at times welcomed. There is the season, yet not the hour. The day is seized, but forever, thus rendered emblematic, eternalized. The articles before the nouns are all definite.
A sophisticated and complex operation, made possible only by the linguistic verification that was proper to him. Constant, in fact, was the strenuous critique, in the philological sense, of his own means, a forma mentis perhaps derived from Modernism itself; constant the intention to use everything that contemporary civilization has acquired, but in order to improve and re-verify language itself from within, without destroying or subverting it: this, I believe, was the underlying sense of his operation, truly modern and, in the sense already outlined, modernist. The empty skies, "an object-subject" (…), "what we might call the poetics of the void of action", writes Francesco Federico Mancini[28], are in this sense very close to today's sensibility as well; and every lemma is brought back to its original figure. Hence the extreme concentration, the icastic sign, the composition as spare as a theorem, the chastity of the painting that make him classically modern.
Maddoli does not speak (only) to his contemporaries: he poses the problem of history, inserting himself into the genealogy and addressing posterity, but the true interlocution is with the One who is outside time.

Notes

[1] "L'intima discrezione della pittura." Giorgio Maddoli (1916-1978), exhibition catalogue curated by Francesco Federico Mancini, Perugia, Palazzo Baldeschi, 21 November 2015 to 21 February 2016, edited by F. F. Mancini, aguaplano, Perugia 2015.

[2] Giorgio Maddoli (1916- 1978) La poesia di un pittore dell'Umbria, exhibition catalogue, Florence, Palazzo Bastogi, 6-20 April 2018, Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, n.p. 2018, with essential bibliography.

[3] Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, David Joselit Arte dal 1900, Modernismo. Antimodernismo. Postmodernismo, edited by Elio Grazioli, Zanichelli, Bologna 2013 (edition consulted; original edition 2004).

[4] F. Di Pilla Francesi e italiani nel cuore di una crisi (Lettere inedite di Alfred Loisy, Paul Sabatier, Albert Houtin, Ernesto Buonaiuti, Romolo Murri, Francesco Mari e altri, offprint from the «Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell'Università degli Studi di Perugia», vol XIV, 1976-1977.

[5] VII Mostra Interprovincialedel Sindacato Fascista di Belle Arti, Terni 1939.

[6] On Enzo Rossi I take the liberty of referring to my B. Pedace Perugia liberata Arte e sistema dell'arte a Perugia da fine anni Trenta ai primi anni Cinquanta, with a preface by Enrico Crispolti, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2012.

[7] Flavio Cuniberto I paesaggi del Regno, Neri Pozza, Milano 2017.

[8] Cf. Michele Dantini "Quiete", demografia, Impero. Motivi ideologici nel quadro di paesaggio in Italia nel periodo dell'entre-deux-guerres", in Una profondissima quiete. Riccardo Francalancia e il ritorno alla figura tra De Chirico e Donghi, exhibition catalogue curated by Beatrice Avanzi, Vittorio Sgarbi, Michele Dantini, Assisi, Palazzo Bonacquisti, 18 May to 4 November 2018, Fondazione CariPerugia Arte, Fabrizio Fabbri Editore, Perugia 2018.

[9] Umberto Raponi Testimonianza in Giorgio Maddoli, exhibition catalogue curated by Antonio Carlo Ponti and Fedora Boco, CERP, Centro Espositivo Rocca Paolina, 17 September to 9 October 1994, with texts by Italo Tomassoni, Massimo Duranti, Mariano Apa, with bibliography, Accademia di Belle Arti "Pietro Vannucci", Perugia, 1994, n.p. 1994.

[10] Cf. Marcello Camillucci Ricordo di Giorgio Maddoli, in G. Maddoli, exhibition catalogue, with critical anthology, Edizioni Grafica Salvi, Perugia 1979.

[11] F. F. Mancini "L'intima discrezione della pittura", in "L'intima discrezione della pittura." Giorgio Maddoli (1916-1978), exhibition catalogue, cit.

[12] Notable in this sense his volunteer work in the San Vincenzo, in which he also involved Rossi; cf. E. Rossi, cit.

[13] Cf. R. Goodnough Pollock Paints a Picture, photographs by Hans Namuth, «ARTnews», vol. 50, no. 3, May 1951.

[14] I am referring of course to John Dewey, Art as Experience, Putnam, New York 1934; first Italian edition L'arte come esperienza, translated and edited by Corrado Maltese, La Nuova Italia, Firenze 1951. For a fairly recent contribution cf. Marco Senaldi Art as experience e l'arte contemporanea in Esperienza estetica a partire da John Dewey, edited by Luigi Russo, Supplementa, «Aesthetica Preprint», 21, December 2007, Centro Internazionale di Studi di Estetica, Palermo n.d.; the volume, to which the reader is referred as a whole, contains numerous other essays. Senaldi recalls the influence exerted by Dewey on T. Benton, Pollock's teacher, and traces Pollock's own change of course precisely to his electrifying encounter with Dewey's philosophy.

[15] The interpretation suggested by those photographs was indeed deeply interrelated with an idea of art as process and as experience, of Deweyan matrix. I would problematically add an almost primitive and ritual component, itself in some way not entirely extraneous to that conception. On these themes cf. B. Pedace Interrelazioni tra l'arte italiana e gli Stati Uniti (1963-1971). Problemi estetici e critici, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2018.

[16] The existential paths of the artists bear witness to this ad abundantiam.

[17] Cf. my Interrelazioni…, cit.

[18] I thank Cristina Maddoli, a most precious source for this essay, for her great generosity and her impassioned testimonies.

[19] B. Pedace Perugia liberata…, cit.

[20] Cf. M. Dantini "Quiete", demografia, Impero..., cit. For Dottori, though in another key, one may recall the metaphorical version of the fatale landscape of the antica madre, in the fresco at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, La luce dell'antica madre, 1937, thus prior to the period now under discussion, which I had occasion to treat in detail in the volume on art in Perugia from the Thirties to the Fifties, already cited, to which I refer the reader.

[21] M. Camillucci Ricordo di Giorgio Maddoli, cit.

[22] Enzo Rossi Ricordo di Giorgio Maddoli, in G. Maddoli, exhibition catalogue, cit.

[23] F. F. Mancini "L'intima discrezione della pittura"…, cit.

[24] An examination in Massimo Duranti Arte per il Sacro, in Giorgio Maddoli, exhibition catalogue curated by Antonio Carlo Ponti and Fedora Boco, cit.

[25] Cf. Arte sacra in Umbria, exhibition catalogue curated by Mimmo Coletti, Massimo Duranti, Antonio Carlo Ponti, Palazzo dei Priori, Perugia 1986.

[26] Piergiorgio Giacché Testimonianza in Giorgio Maddoli, exhibition cat. curated by Antonio Carlo Ponti and Fedora Boco, cit.

[27] Alfredo De Poi Testimonianza in Giorgio Maddoli, exhibition cat., cit.

[28] F. F. Mancini "L'intima discrezione della pittura", in "L'intima discrezione della pittura". Giorgio Maddoli (1916-1978), exhibition catalogue, cit.

Trained at the University of Perugia and holding a research doctorate in Art History from the University of Siena under E. Crispolti, Bianca Pedace earned a doctorate at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia. She teaches Aesthetics at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Perugia and at that of Reggio Calabria. An independent curator, she is the author of monographs including: Vittoria Lippi, Rubbettino, 2011; Perugia liberata. Artisti e sistema dell'arte a Perugia da fine anni Trenta ai primi anni Cinquanta, Rubbettino, 2012; Interrelazioni tra l'arte italiana e gli Stati Uniti (1963-1971). Problemi estetici e critici, Rubbettino, 2018. She practices and professes the interrelation between the historical, critical and theoretical sides.