A weekend of initiatives on the exhibitions “Leoncillo. L’antico” and “Vinicio Berti”

In particular, on the afternoon of Saturday, March 26 the appointments will be dedicated to children and their families, with two artistic workshops inspired by the art of Leoncillo entitled Art workshops. In a block of clay, while on Sunday 27 the meetings will be aimed at adults, with special guided visits on the exhibitions of Leoncillo and Vinicio Berti, between informal art and classical abstract art, centered on both authors and will be managed by the cultural mediation of MUS.E.

Special visits. Leoncillo and Vinicio Berti, between informal art and classic abstract art

Sunday, March 27 h3pm and h4.30pm

The visits allow you to rediscover two leading figures of post-war Italian art, the Umbrian sculptor Leoncillo and the Florentine painter Vinicio Berti. Politically “committed” artists, they were both able to offer an innovative contribution to national avant-garde movements between the 1950s and 1960s, through an original and painful artistic and conceptual evolution.

Born in Spoleto in 1915, Leoncillo approached the Roman school of Mario Mafai and Scipione in the 1930s and then worked on the production of large-scale ceramics in Umbertide. Convinced anti-fascist, he participated in the Second World War as a partisan, approaching Picasso’s cubism at that time. After the events in Hungary in 1956, which saw the Soviet invasion of the country, Leoncillo faces a creative crisis that leads him to move away from the Communist Party and figurative sculpture, to embrace an informal abstraction. In the rooms of the museum it is possible to follow the artistic evolution of the sculptor, from the first Baroque works in dialogue with the ceramics of Lucio Fontana, to informal masterpieces in clay and ceramics such as San Sebastiano, Taglio Rosso, Tale of the night.

The work of Vinicio Berti, one hundred of which are remembered since his birth in 1921, allows you to learn more about a significant but still little known artist outside of Tuscany. Considered the father of classical abstractionism, Berti was in contact with leading masters of Italian abstract painting, from Dorazio and Achille Perilli, to Gillo Dorfles and Emilio Vedova. In the small exhibition it is possible to admire a recently restored triptych in which the artist explores the theme of the city, depicting urban landscapes, hostile and impenetrable to man. A highly successful graphic designer and cartoonist, Berti lived his political commitment in a critical and confrontational way, repeatedly clashing with the Communist Party’s conceptions of art. The collection of almost six hundred works, together with manuscripts and author’s papers donated by the artist’s widow to the Municipality of Florence, constitutes a legacy of extreme value for all art lovers. The visits will be conducted by Eva Francioli and Elisabetta Stumpo.