Carla Lonzi @ The National Gallery

The first official contact between Carla Lonzi and the National Gallery took place in 1959, on the occasion of Modern art and the theatre, a series of meetings organised by Giovanni Carandente.

Carla Lonzi was invited to hold her presentation entitled The figurative arts and contemporary theatre.

The Lonzi Archive is proof of the scholar's considerable preparation and research work on the theme of the conference.

Among other documents, the archive contains the photographic reproductions of particularly meaningful scenography, produced by artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Felice Casorati, Mario Sironi, Enrico Prampolini, Carlo Carrà, Renato Guttuso.

The original typescript of the conference text is also included.

And Carla Lonzi's long correspondence with Giovanni Carandente and Palma Bucarelli.

“… There is a different way of dealing with the issue of the relationship between figurative arts and contemporary scenography and it consists in researching which spatial solutions from the crisis of the naturalist theatre boosted modern scenography...”.

“… In other words, how theatre, driven by symbolist needs, rejected the old space of naturalism to replace it with a new one, suitable for housing the new poetic inspirations and expressing them…”.

On that same year, 1959, Carla Lonzi was invited by her teacher, the art historian Roberto Loghi, to collaborate with the art magazine L’Approdo Letterario (The Literary Landing), for which Lonzi edited the exhibition of figurative arts until 1969.

On several occasions Carla Lonzi voiced her thoughts on the exhibitions of the National Gallery from the pages of L’Approdo Letterario.

The first was the one on the Russian artist Kazimir Malevič, quoted in the article published in July 1959.

Other major exhibitions dedicated by the National Gallery to the masters of modern art followed, such as the De Stijl exhibition finely described by Lonzi, and also narrated by her on the radio broadcast L’Approdo in January 1961.

In 1962, Lonzi reviewed two exhibitions at the National Gallery from the pages of the magazine: the one on Oska Schlemmer and the great retrospective on American artist Mark Rothko.