Art and Carla Lonzi

Between 1956 and 1957, Carla Lonzi began to publish her first reviews of art exhibitions in the column "Mostre d'arte a Firenze" in Il Paese.

This included reviews of exhibitions by Pessarelli, Barbaro, Loffredo, Nativi, Peyron, Vespignani, Braque and Rouault, Midollini, Pecchioli, Pini and Rosai.

Her long collaboration with Galleria Notizie in Turin allowed her to meet and establish direct relationships with major Italian and international artists (Pinot Gallizio, Mario Merz, Cy Twombly), for whom she wrote the presentation texts for the catalogues of the exhibitions held there.

These writings reveal “the itinerary of Lonzi's critical choices, from the confrontation with the informal to the various trends that radically changed artistic languages in the Sixties".

For a long time, this amazing itinerary remained focussed on painting, which she observed with a gaze that she had refined while she was at the Longhi school in Florence.

Her uncommon ability to read the qualities of pictorial surfaces in their infinite variations, without ever losing sight of the complexity and depth of art history, can be traced back to those formative years".

From 1959 to 1969, she also collaborated in the radio show "L'Approdo" and the journal "L'Approdo Letterario".

Carla Lonzi and Mario Nigro.

Also during this period, she sent three different articles to L'Approdo Letterario, published respectively in No. 41 of January-March 1968, No. 42 of April-June 1968 and No. 43 of July-September 1968, on exhibitions and artistic activities in American galleries and museums: Notizie da New York, Prestigio dell’Europa in due grandi mostre a New York e a Buffalo, Hemisfair 1968 a San Antonio Texas.

In these articles, Lonzi affirms and stresses the still European nature of the artists "[...]. One wonders what American art could be if it detached itself from those categorical modes, if it rethought the process of identification from which it started...

...It seems that much of American life – its inner workings – remain, so to speak, excluded from the mental patterns through which art operates. In short, [...], the concept of art and its meaning, the modes of production and the relationship of the artist to his work, place and function in society are still European".

Her friend, Lando Landini, and Carlo Betocchi of "L'Approdo Letterario" asked her to clarify this concept.

In a letter dated 29th February 1968, Betocchi wrote to her: "Towards the end of New York II, indeed at the end of the last paragraph, I was unable to understand what the hell that phrase between the two full stops means 'American art between Julius II and Suleiman the Magnificent'. I circled it in red and put a question mark beside it".

Pubblicato da Di Donato nell’autunno 1969, è il testo più importante di Lonzi critica, uno dei più belli ed originali sull’arte degli anni Sessanta.

The use of the recorder – at the time an absolute innovation – allowed her to render the authentic voice of the artist, without the linguistic filter of the critic.

In the introduction to the volume, she wrote:

“this book does not intend to push for a fetishism of the artist, but to reclaim artists for a different relationship with society. Therefore, it denies the role (hence the power) of the critic as a repressive control over art and artists, and especially in as far as it represents an ideology of art and artists that is common in our society".

Lonzi concluded her work as an art critic with Autoritratto.