Dear, Sweet Memories of the Good Old days, Italy 1961. The Big Bertha

In 1959, Tancredi left Venice to move first to Paris and later to Milan. Prompted by Robert Rauschenberg's combine-paintings, seen at the Aries Gallery in Milan, Tancredi began experimenting with the technique of collage in a new and final phase of his production. The artist inserts fragments and clippings of newspaper and magazine mastheads into canvases organized with chromatic globes. In "Dear sweet memories of the good old days, Italy, 1961, The Big Bertha", Tancredi evokes popular war imagery: reproduced in a press clipping, a cannon of exceptional performance (nicknamed "The Big Bertha"), designed by the German Krupp steelworks at the end of World War I to strike French and British targets from a hundred kilometers away, appears at the top of the canvas.