Italian Lessons

It already seems a long time since I left Italy and I've been very busy trying to revise for my Italian exams this week, and getting side-tracked by things I'd much rather be doing than learning Italian verbs! One of my displacement activities has been putting all my photos on the computer. This time, rather than landscape, I seem to have a lot of art exhibitions. I suppose that, living with a visual artist, I probably go to more than most people and they always make me feel very envious. I've never been able to draw - not even a cartoon cat. How wonderful to be able to create a visual image that doesn't require you to speak the language before you can read it. That's the biggest drawback of being a writer - it's culture specific. Nothing is ever the same in translation.

When I look at a painting or a sculpture I instinctively want to start creating a story round them, but this isn't always possible with abstract art. This, Neil explains, has a secret language of its own which, like most people, I don't fully understand - though I love the rhythms of shape and colour. It was Neil who taught me to look at abstract art suppressing my narrative instincts. He taught me about flowing lines, intersecting planes of light and dark, relationships of mass and space, explained that - like listening to music - you can look at something and enjoy it without understanding exactly how it's structured.




One of the highlights of my trip to Italy was an exhibition of the work of Rosario Murabito. It was being held in a nineteenth century palazzo, originally built for an Austrian princess, but now owned by the local commune who find it too expensive to maintain. So it is rarely used. You get the feeling that the whole of Italy is full of historic buildings that no one can really afford.

Murabito was one of a group of artists living in the area during the post war period, dividing their time between Tuscany and New York. He did his best work in the fifties and sixties - much of it on display here. As we walked through the grand reception rooms, footsteps echoing on the marble floors, there were paintings, collages and sculptures that took your breath away when you stood in front of them - like hearing an authentic voice in poetry - that prickle at the back of the neck that says 'yes, this is something extraordinary'.


He experimented widely, like Picasso, with different mediums and techniques, migrating from figurative to abstract and back again. There were strange, androngynous figures out of mythology, a wonderful, almost abstract bull that could have leapt out of a cave painting and some collages in coloured leather that I would happily have taken home with me.




Murabito's work is now rather unfashionable and on the two evenings we visited the exhibition, we were the only people there. He died in 1972 and left his own house and some of his work to the local commune. They've never had enough money to do the necessary repairs to the building so that it could be used as he wished - as a museum to display his work - so exhibitions like this are rare and not to be missed.

Sun, Sea and Sand Sculpture

As you might anticipate, in Pietrasanta they don't build sandcastles at the beach, they do sand sculptures! And, of course, it's a competition. Neil was asked to take part, but couldn't fit it in this year because of a previous commitment, but we did go down during the afternoon to see what was going on. The beach at Pietrasanta Marina is an arc of volcanic Mediterranean sand with the marble mountains of the Alpe Apuane as a spectacular backdrop.







Near the edge of the sea, whole families were helping mothers and fathers to create works of art in the damp sand, just out of reach of the waves, to last as long as the tide allowed. One English sculptor had dug two long, diverging trenches which acted as an optical illusion when viewed through a hole in a piece of wood. Next to it there was a giant scarab beetle.



Further along a Polish/Danish bunch of grapes, a German abstract based on the internal structure of a shell, and an Italian sea-monster dragging its victim back into a hole.







Another abstract consisted of seven circles dug into an area of sand, which was patterned with a rake. A single set of child's footprints ran diagonally across - which looked good but was entirely accidental! One sculptor had dug down into the sand to create the interior of a basilica roof - very intricate and difficult.



It all looked great fun and I hope that next year I'll be there, bucket and spade in hand, as the sculptor's apprentice.

Vazha, Sculpture and the Misty Mountains of Pruno

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I've just come back from the studio of Vazha Mikaberidze, who sculpts as 'Prasto'. Vazha is a Georgian, living and working in Italy. His work extends from the figurative to the abstract and even the conceptual and his studio is crowded with examples. Huge textured plaster sheets stand against the wall, with seductive tactile patterns. Vazha takes a rubber mould from the trunk of particularly interesting trees. He then cuts it lengthwise and opens it out flat to reveal the patterns of the bark, selecting sections to cast in plaster and then in bronze or nickel. In another corner a life-size man springs from the wall, arms spread out, his jacket flying on either side like wings. This is Sergei Parajanov - a Georgian film director whose work and personal
beliefs put him in a soviet gulag for more than six years. The plaster model, bursting with character, is the maquette for a bronze outside the opera house in Tblisi.


Around the floor are beautiful abstract forms - many of them referencing the natural world. Delicate figures form a circle around a pair of feet, like a corps de ballet - a sculpture that was actually made as a stage set for a ballet. It is part of a body of work that is a homage to the choreographer Balanchine which Vazha is currently working on though the project is on hold at the moment until the situation between Russia and Georgia is resolved.


Vazha's stories are a reminder that, whatever the problems of funding in Europe, the politics of art are much simpler and less dangerous here than elsewhere.


Afterwards we drove up into the Apuane to have lunch at a little hill village called Pruno, where you can have a plate of home-made pasta with wild-boar sauce for 6 euros and where the wine comes in earthenware jugs.


The weather is changing with the full moon. After two months of searing temperatures and no rain, clouds are gathering over the hills, and everyone is hoping for some wet weather. The trees are scorched to brown and the rivers are dry. Tonight it is so humid our clothes are sticking to our backs and the mosquitos are attacking every square inch of skin not coated with chemicals. Not quite paradise - but almost!

Pietrasanta and the Anti-art Movement

The small town of Pietrasanta (the name means sainted or blessed stone) has been at the heart of the marble industry in Italy for more than two thousand years. The five thousand foot mountains that surround the town have been chiselled away by centuries of intrepid quarrymen and from a distance you can see glaciers of glittering marble waste slithering down gullies towards the valley floor. On the precipitous roads, marble lorries thunder past like mobile earthquakes, leaving a drifting fog of white dust behind them.

You can still climb up to the quarry where Michael Angelo found the block from which he carved David. You can still see the old building where he may or may not have stayed while he was here. Pietrasanta lives off the sculpture industry and there are also several foundries where sculptors from all over the world come to get their work cast into bronze.


Henry Moore had much of his work cast here, as did Noguchi, and now Barry Flanagan, Kan, Bottero and Mitoraj all have work standing in the yards. The infamous statue of Saddam Hussein started out here too.

Residents of Pietrasanta are descended from generation after generation of artigiani, skilled at realising the work of others and turning plaster or terracotta maquettes into life-size works of art. The Anti-Art Movement, which began with Dada, wants to leave the traditions of the past behind and deconstruct all our notions of art. It too, is alive and well in Pietrasanta.


I’ve just been to the opening of an exhibition of Antonio Luchinelli’s work. He is one of those who can trace their ancestry back through the artigiani and he is best known for making moulds for the world-famous Kan. Antonio is a skilled mould-maker - meticulously reproducing whatever he’s given. This exhibition of his own work - a statement of his personal espousal of ‘Anti Art’ - is a series of pieces linked by a play on words, though I have to confess that I couldn’t engage with it at all, even when the linguistics were explained to me.

But then I’m on the side of art - with or without the capital letter - and I don’t believe it needs to be elitist - anyone can do it on any level, like writing. But I also believe that some people can do it better than others. I know I’m making a qualitative judgement when I say that; I know that everyone is entitled to read or look at whatever gives them pleasure, but - in my opinion - there is a lot of crap out there fetching huge sums of money. And there are an awful lot of people, in art and anti-art, who share the Emperor’s tailor.