On the centenary of the birth of Leonardo Cremonini (Bologna 1925 – Paris 2010), the Pinacoteca Comunale of Città di Castello pays tribute to one of the most radical interpreters of painting in the second half of the 20th century.
The exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci and Azalea Seratoni, in collaboration with the Archivio Leonardo Cremonini and Montrasio Arte, retraces the artist’s work, places, and friendships, revisiting the key moments from his postwar beginnings up to the threshold of the new millennium. Cremonini’s was the pursuit of an artist able to maintain a free and unconventional position within the international artistic and intellectual scene.
His artistic career began in 1951, when Cremonini arrived in Paris thanks to a scholarship, after years of training at the academies of Bologna and Milan. The young painter was in search of a new language through which to read reality: the path toward an original figuration had just begun. His stay in Ischia further enriched his connections, and it was there that his painting took shape in a harmonious tension between man, animal, woman, and sea. In the exhibition catalogue, Azalea Seratoni speaks of “this kind of equality, this still uncorrupted merging between human beings and nature in Cremonini’s painting. Cremonini paints bodies and stones by the sea, lying in idleness or asleep in the moonlight. They belong to the landscape not in their defined, conventional roles, but in the sense that human beings belong to the world.”
In Forio, at Maria Senese’s Bar Internazionale, Cremonini met writers and artists such as Margery and Carlyle Brown, W. H. Auden, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Herbert List, Cecil Beaton, and—through Carlyle Brown—his first New York gallerist in 1952: Catherine Viviano, who hosted his debut solo exhibition in the United States. As Fiorucci recalls in the catalogue, “Cremonini is the Italian artist who, alongside Alberto Burri and even before Afro, Mirko, Capogrossi, and shortly after Corrado Cagli, was enthusiastically welcomed in the USA, quickly entering major collections such as that of MoMA.”
In Italy, Cremonini found an early and significant reference point in Irene Brin and Gaspero Del Corso’s Obelisco gallery, where in 1954 he held his first solo show in the country. On this occasion, he met Francis Bacon, who was spending several months in Italy; thanks to Bacon, he came into contact with his London gallerist, Erica Brausen, with whom Cremonini would exhibit at the Hanover Gallery in 1955.
In the following years, Cremonini moved away from pure plastic monumentality to embrace a more enigmatic narrative: works such as I codici di un giardino (1965) and Au coin du plein air (1966–67) depict bourgeois interiors or holiday settings, transfigured into ambiguous and unsettling scenarios.