L'informale di Giuseppe Ferrari, Maria Petroni e Andrea Raccagni

This research is divided in two parts. The first one is methodological, the second one is an application of the first. The methodology I’m referring to is the one I received since 1990-1991 from my teacher, professor Renato Barilli (born in 1935), when I attended a course of him dedicated to the English painter William Turner at the University of Bologna. So, what is phenomenology of style and science of culture, the two main battle horses ridden by Barilli when approaching history of art? Let’s say better: how these disciplines were born? Here you can find one of the most important points of my research, due to the conviction that Abstract Expressionism, the international artistic movement of the Forties and Fifties, influenced the birth of the methodology Barilli officially uses since 1980. What does this mean? First of all, the refuse of the nexus cause/effect so typical of the modern art and critic (as Modernity I mean the period since 1450 to 1789, as Contemporary age the period since 1789 till nowadays), the first one symbolized by Leon Battista Alberti’s perspective and western naturalism (they both have a strong rational print), the second by philology, a discipline born during Positivism. So, here I introduce the presence of Francesco Arcangeli (1915-1974), one of the teacher of Barilli, even if not directly. Arcangeli slowly understands that is the time to pass from a History of Art meant as quantity to one who is meant as quality: so, from philology used by his teacher Longhi to the individuation of ‘bridges’, nucleus of a no codified tradition. At a mere stylistic level, this means the abandon of a measurable space, the one of western naturalism, for a fluid space, open and due also to the hazard. Arcangeli starts to hit the illuminist rational nexus cause/effect he received from his teacher Longhi, and this also for a particular psychological disposition which enables him to catch this important change. The younger Barilli has the chance to see this important ‘experiment’. At that time we can say Bologna is the umbilicus of the Italian artistic historiography. In the Emilian town in fact there’s a situation quite similar to the one that some year before you could find in the Los Alamos desert in Texas, where the first nuclear bomb exploded: a huge energy was spread for the fission of the uranium atom. Similarly Arcangeli hits the static nexus his teacher Roberto Longhi represents, something that involves also moral, politics and thinking. The limits of History of art are so overcome). The young Barilli sees this experiment and, enthusiastic, understands its potentialities, which also involve the overcoming of the new idealist esthetics quite followed in Italy at that time (Benedetto Croce in primis). So my thesis is the first try to study Renato Barilli’s thought and methodology. Barilli still has a position not well accepted from Italian culture, as the discussion of this thesis showed indirectly. My work found an aggressive and close acceptance, and I had to fight in order to defend it. I decided to study a capital critic essay by Barilli, La Barriera del Naturalismo, edited in1964 (I also attended last course of Barilli at University of Bologna, before he retired in 2007); I also studied La Rivoluzione Romantica by Rodolfo Bottacchiari (1943), a book known by critics even if not deeply analyzed, even if important to understand the step forward Arcangeli made compared to his teacher Longhi. These two ‘bibles’ clearly show the open, stratified, no naturalistic, no individualistic, ’irrational’, highly ’erotic’ aspect of contemporary man (near who you find traces of the individualistic/bourgeois modern behave still well spread in our society). I also focalized the important role of Giovanni Pascoli, a writer who is a ’door’ open toward these quality characters; I analyzed Pascoli using technological materialism offered by Marshall McLuhan and by Renato Barilli to me. The second part of my research is an application of the conclusion of the previous pages, even if you can put it at the beginning of the work. I mean I used an empirical method which puts artistic work before any theory (let’s say better, the two have a common life, they grow up together). Giuseppe Ferrari and Andrea Raccagni are analytical at their first period: they carefully measure the space of the canvas. In fact Ferrari is firstly a postimpressionist, and little later he follows a new Cezanne style (at the base of both these two poetics you find the Euclidean geometry, confirmed in Modern Era by Descartes); the young Raccagni is surrealist-metaphysical, and uses a well calculated touch in his works. When Abstract Expressionism arrives, all this is left apart. Space is seen by artist d’emblée, without being measured before, following a hic at nunc (a Latin expression which means ‘here and now’) poetic which follows casual solutions. Casual solutions that qualifies a poetic you may define as ’autre’, a bomb put inside the walls of rational naturalism (a product typical of western culture if you define it as a mimetic representation of actions in art and literature). Maria Peroni’s Abstract Expressionism confirms the ’quality’ character of our time. I used the Freudian trio Ego-SuperEgo-Es, showing that Es is the main distributor of energy of our time, opposed to the closeness thought of Modern Era, symbolized by the perspective cage. So Abstract Expressionism is not only important as an artistic fact: its understanding means the acceptance of a new model of society and behavior.