chiudi

Sigfrido Bartolini (1937-2007) is best known to art historians, particularly to those outside Italy, for his important scholarly studies of the prints of such artists as Soffici (1972), Sironi (1976), Achille Lega (1980), Rosai (1989), Italo Cremona (1994) and Romeo Costetti (2001). However, he was a highly accomplished printmaker in his own right. His work was exhibited last year at the Fondazione Carlo Collodi in Pescia, accompanied by the catalogue Sigfrido Bartolini: la Forma del Tempo (Florence, Edizioni Polistampa, 2009, 72 pp, 19 col. and 3 b. & w. Ills., euro 14), edited by Beatrice F. Buscaroli with essays by Buscaroli, Siliano Simoncini and Luigi Salvagnini. Carlo Collodi was the creator in 1880 of Pinocchio. Bartolini illustrated the 1983 edition of Pinocchio with over 300 woodcuts. There were two further editions of Bartolini’s Pinocchio in 1996 and 2007. In addition, Bartolini illustrated Alberto Savinio’s Collodi with 28 woodcuts in 1991.So it not surprising that the Fondazione should have wanted to celebrate the work of this artist, a native of nearby Pistoia. The show included both paintings and prints dating from 1976 into the new century.
Bartolini’s paintings and their subjects are very reminiscent of the later art of Soffici, but also relate to the Tuscan tradition of pictures of farm buildings and Tyrrhenian beach huts of several of Soffici’s contemporaries, such as Carrà. Figures are noticeably absent. Even in the two Pinocchio woodcuts illustrated here the protagonist is dwarfed by his surroundings. Also feautured is a typical four-square frontal colour lithographof an abandoned farm building and peaceful aquantits of the Madonna di Pie’ di Piazza and thePiazza Santo Stefano in Pescia, both of which were commissioned by the Associazione ’Amici di Pescia’. At the end of his life, between 2005 and 2006, Bartolini also designed fourteen stained-glass windows for the Chiesa dell’Immacolata, Pescia. The texts accompanying the illustrations in the exhibition catalogue have been selected from Disperata felicità, the artist’s unpublished diary that he kept for over 50 years.
Bartolini, who is no relation of Luigi Bartolini, attended the Scuola Statale d’Arte di Pistoia at the end of World War II. For a decade he ran a firm of house painters,devoting the evenings to his art. Bartolini met Soffici c. 1949 and the older artist introduced him to Carrà, Funi and many other painters. Bartolini’s first one-man show was held at the Accademia Pistoiese del Ceppo in 1956. Four years later he exhibited a seriesof woodcuts at the New York World Fair. Like many Italian twentieth-century artists, Bartolini writes poetry. His Canti silvestri was also published in 1963. Bartolini’s friendship with Soffici led to a portfolio of ten etchings, Omaggio a Soffici, issued in 1965. A porfolio of ten small woodcuts with a text by Barna Occhini was published in 1967, the year in which he published the first of a number of livres d’artiste. On this occasion he executed a series of woodcuts to illustrate his own stories, Chiesa di Cristo & altri generi. Bartolini regularly issued albums of prints, for instance, seven colour woodcuts in 1969, a further fifteen in 1970, and two portfolios of etchings and of woodcuts respectively in 1971. A monograph, Sigfrido Bartolini − 80 incisioni, was published in Reggio Emilia in 1977. A further book, Sigfrido Bartolini, by Piero Buscaroli, appeared in 1981. A large retrospective of the artist’s work was held in Milan’s Palazzo della Triennale in 2000.
For Bartolini’s monotypes one can now consult Sigfrido Bartolini, monotipi 1948-2001: catalogo generale (Florence, Edizioni Polistampa, 2010, 144 pp., 179 col. and 11 b. & w. ills , euro 26), edited by Elena Pontiggia, which includes an essay by Siliano Simoncini. Published here too are a number of drawings related to the monotypes. There is a useful chronology of Bartolini’s life, which doubles as bibliography. Also provided is a list of the artist’s writings. Most of Bartolini’s monotypes were made between 1948 and 1955. He took up the technique again in 1963 for fourteen Stations of the Cross, which the Milan publisher Cerastico gave to a church in Liberia. Although colour illustrations are published here, their present whereabouts are unkown. Pontiggia was also unable to trace the present owners of eighteen other monotypes, most of which are reproduced here. Bartolini made a group of four monotypes of a Versilian beach in 1994, a monochromatic Christmas monotype in 1997, and finally, a colour monotype in 1997 to demonstrate the method used by Romeo Costetti in 2001, when he curated a show of that artist’s prints in Reggio Emilia. Bartolini was faithful to the Tuscan tradition of Strapaese throughout his carrer. The only interruption in his sequence of rural and domestic subjects was a set of nine striking, large colour monotypes, The triumph of Death, in which a critical view of the priesthood is expressed. A selection of his religious monotypes was exhibited at the Galleria Vannucci in Pistoia in 1963.
Data recensione: 01/09/2010
Testata Giornalistica: Print Quarterly
Autore: Martin Hopkinson