Papers by Filippo Bosco
The Burlington Contemporary, 2023
The truth of drawing is an old-age cliche in the theory of drawing, which persisted beyond the po... more The truth of drawing is an old-age cliche in the theory of drawing, which persisted beyond the post-medium turn of the Sixties and post-minimalism, by the phenomenological impulse of process art. This generated declarative, conceptualist "true drawings", like Giulio Paolini's "Il Vero". At the same time, another paradigm of drawing originated to challenge truth, in the name of a "Disegno finto" (to quote from Enzo Cucchi's artist book published in 1978): from Gino De Dominicis to Francesco Clemente, the paper provides a selection of drawing practices based on strategies of performativity (that act against process), fake authorship (that counter the sincerity of the ‘hand’) and deceitful visuality (that restrict clear readability).
Giuseppe Penone Dessins, 2022
The essay is the result of a first comprehensive study of Giuseppe Penone's drawings donated to t... more The essay is the result of a first comprehensive study of Giuseppe Penone's drawings donated to the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The path of Penone's drawing practice in the 1970s is traced within a larger context of debate and other artists' researches. Major themes of the decade are discussed, namely planning (for Penone, "project" stands for a "projection" in time of the work), frottage and imprint (and the subsequent paradigm of materiality), but also figuration and illustration within the artist book. The analysis goes from contextual notes and exhibition history to the close observation of some works on paper, characterized by a great variety of techniques (including pastel), finishing degree and function within the creative process.
Felice Casorati. Il concerto della pittura, 2023
This paper reconstructs the forgotten biography of Mariuccia Gandini (1897-1924), a fundamental f... more This paper reconstructs the forgotten biography of Mariuccia Gandini (1897-1924), a fundamental figure in the life and work of Felice Casorati (1883-1963), the major painter of Italian Magic Realism. Archival researches and new findings allow to overcome the oblivion followed to her early death. Her role was not limited to the sentimental relationship with the painter, but involves her work as a model and creative companion, as the two shared interest for music (Gandini, sister of a Turinese composer, was a celebrated pianist herself). The paper also traces her presence in paintings and drawings, from actual portraits to more ambiguous dedications or allusions, that were importantly collected in Casorati's solo exhibition at the Venice biennial in 1924.
Mostre fotografiche in Italia negli anni Settanta, Università di Parma, 2022
Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, serie 5, 2020, 12/2, 2021
This paper aims at reconstructing the origin of the allegorical meaning in the work of the Italia... more This paper aims at reconstructing the origin of the allegorical meaning in the work of the Italian painter Felice Casorati, as it emerges in the ensembles sent to three Milanese exhibitions between 1921 and 1922. These exhibitions constitute a turning point of his career, when he is trying to position himself in the national panorama of modern art, putting off his participation to the Venice Biennale and establishing a new own public image. Casorati sets a new dialogue among his paintings and sculptures exhibited one next to the other, through a net of mise en abîme and quotations among the works themselves. The fascination for the studio work is indebted to Cézanne’s reception of the time and, on a visual level, to the use of photographs in Casorati’s practice. The image of the atelier, as both the shared background of his paintings and their ultimate subject, becomes a constant and refers more and more clearly to the artist’s work and to a self-reflection of painting upon itself.
Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies, Issue 4 (2021), 2021
This paper aims to give a queer reading of some mid-1960s Pop Art paintings, whose more or less d... more This paper aims to give a queer reading of some mid-1960s Pop Art paintings, whose more or less direct subject is the brushstroke. Queer hermeneutical instruments, like the concept of performativity, can recount the strategies set up by Pop artworks in order to deconstruct the essentialist meanings associated with the image of the thick, gestural brushstroke typical of Abstract Expressionism. All along the Fifties and Sixties, details of abstract painting spread and got a centrality due to Rosenberg's and Greenberg's pervasive critical systems as regards painting. The former interpreted the brushstroke as the direct expression of the life and the action of the painter; the latter, as the "nature" of painting itself as pure color on a surface. Countering this critical rhetoric, Lichtenstein artificially constructed flat images of the Expressionist brushstroke; Dine called into question its status of representation or reality; Rosenquist formulated food-like metaphors of abstraction, stressing its popularization in the mass media, and overturned the rhetoric of "natural" expressionist creation; Hockney camouflaged photographic figuration as a form of "drag abstraction".
Italian Modern Art, Metaphysical Masterpieces 1916-1920: Morandi, Sironi, and Carrà, Issue 4, July 2020, 2020
This paper investigates the relationship between Italian pittura metafisica and German Neue Sachl... more This paper investigates the relationship between Italian pittura metafisica and German Neue Sachlichkeit (an "history of influence," as Grosz and other German painters knew about De Chirico and Carrà around 1919; or a "similar paths", as German early objectivity is said to have evolved autonomously). Here I consider this relationship as, in fact, biunivocal, underlining stylistic exchanges on both sides of this international encounter. Elements of the argument are the reception of the exhibition "Das Junste Italien" (1921), Theodor Däubler's writings and early contributions by Franz Roh and their first formulation of a rising objectivity as an "Italienspielerei" (more or less ,an "Italian game"), up to Roh's Magischer Realismus (1925) and the important Italian function played in it and in the new realist instances of both German and Italian painting of the Twenties.
Incisori tedeschi del Cinquecento, a cura di Luca Baroni, Milano 2020, 2020
The short essay sums up the fortune of Dürer's etchings and engravings in Central Europe, from th... more The short essay sums up the fortune of Dürer's etchings and engravings in Central Europe, from the late Symbolism to the New Objectivity. The analysis follows a sequence of examples including direct stylistic relationships (as in the case of Paul Klee), larger cultural and political references (Hodler and German Symbolism up to the Great War) and explicit quotations (Otto Dix).
Ritratto di donna. Il sogno degli anni Venti e lo sguardo di Ubaldo Oppi, a cura di Stefania Portinari, Vicenza 2019, pp. 104-111, 2019
This short essay resumes the relationship of the Italian painter Ubaldo Oppi (1889-1942) with con... more This short essay resumes the relationship of the Italian painter Ubaldo Oppi (1889-1942) with contemporary German painting of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Questioning the nationalistic readings of Oppi's work which were typical in art criticism in the early years of the Fascist regime, the realist or "neoclassical" phase of his painted work shows a lot of interesting connections with German coeval realists such as Georg Schrimpf or Carlo Mense. After being included in Franz Roh's "Magischer Realismus" (Leipzig, 1925), Oppi held numerous European exhibitions and his work encountered international figurative and critical fortune all through the 1920s.
Studi di Memofonte, Numero 21/2018, 2018
This paper examines a series of works by Giuseppe Penone, titled 'Cambiare l’immagine' and execut... more This paper examines a series of works by Giuseppe Penone, titled 'Cambiare l’immagine' and executed in 1973, with the aim to highlight two closely related aspects that make it a peculiar work in the coeval Italian context and in the career of the Turinese artist: his relationship with the graphics of Leonardo da Vinci and the problem of figurative
drawing in Italian conceptualist art. The analysis starts from the work's
role at the 1976 exhibition 'Drawing / Transparence' and from its insertion in Penone's 1977 book 'Rovesciare gli occhi': these attestations allow to place the work within the poetics and the cultural references of the young artist. In this perspective, the analysis of the visual sources from the Windsor drawings by Leonardo in the series of six sheets, either collages or drawings, must be related to the works that since 1968 show the artist’s specific attention to this Old Master. The survey of the ways in which Penone uses these sources highlights the crucial passage of 1973, when the artist assumes the «conceptual» character of Leonardo’s draftsmanship to insert figuration and autography in his own works. Few years later a direct development of this processing results in the series of drawings of the air movements linked to the terracotta entitled Soffio, and included in the catalogue of the important exhibition of Penone set up in Essen in 1978. In this case Penone copies, assembles and reinvents the same Leonardo’s drawings, using traditional graphic techniques and stylisms, clarifying the reasons for adopting a specific language that legitimizes, as had already happened in nuce within Cambiare l’immagine, figurative drawing.
Conference Presentations by Filippo Bosco
Drawing Research Forum, 4 March 2022, 2022
Bosco’s presentation deals with an age-old question - the intrinsic truth of drawing, which acts ... more Bosco’s presentation deals with an age-old question - the intrinsic truth of drawing, which acts as a paradigm in the Italian art of the Seventies. Examples include practices of “true drawing” in Paolini’s engagement with the elementary condition of seeing, or Penone’s indexical traces of the body, or the generational resort to diagrams. But what if drawing's im-mediacy is actually false? Such a challenge is that of some post- conceptualist Italian artists (De Dominicis, Salvo, Clemente, Chia and Cucchi) and their mediations on the image, performativities of the “hand” and the ambiguity of hermeneutics. By fake authorship and photographic manipulation, “false drawings” deconstruct the truth-paradigm for the following decades.
Talks by Filippo Bosco
Menil Drawing Institute, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjj3OtIKvOM&t=1693s
A lecture addressing transparency as a mater... more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjj3OtIKvOM&t=1693s
A lecture addressing transparency as a material and conceptual device in the drawing practices of the 1970s. The use of transparent and translucent supports like glass, vellum, or tracing paper changes both the habitual perception of lines on a surface and the understanding of what exactly drawing is. A variety of works from American and European artists like Barry Le Va, Dorothea Rockburne, Mario Merz, and Remo Salvadori is articulated in the light of contemporary critical debates, categories of architecture theory, and possible congruences with more recent practices (such as Houston artist Joseph Havel’s work). As a literal breaking through the opacity of the sheet, transparency enigmatically disentangles the performative acts that constitute a drawing and expands its spatial and social dimensions.
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Papers by Filippo Bosco
drawing in Italian conceptualist art. The analysis starts from the work's
role at the 1976 exhibition 'Drawing / Transparence' and from its insertion in Penone's 1977 book 'Rovesciare gli occhi': these attestations allow to place the work within the poetics and the cultural references of the young artist. In this perspective, the analysis of the visual sources from the Windsor drawings by Leonardo in the series of six sheets, either collages or drawings, must be related to the works that since 1968 show the artist’s specific attention to this Old Master. The survey of the ways in which Penone uses these sources highlights the crucial passage of 1973, when the artist assumes the «conceptual» character of Leonardo’s draftsmanship to insert figuration and autography in his own works. Few years later a direct development of this processing results in the series of drawings of the air movements linked to the terracotta entitled Soffio, and included in the catalogue of the important exhibition of Penone set up in Essen in 1978. In this case Penone copies, assembles and reinvents the same Leonardo’s drawings, using traditional graphic techniques and stylisms, clarifying the reasons for adopting a specific language that legitimizes, as had already happened in nuce within Cambiare l’immagine, figurative drawing.
Conference Presentations by Filippo Bosco
Talks by Filippo Bosco
A lecture addressing transparency as a material and conceptual device in the drawing practices of the 1970s. The use of transparent and translucent supports like glass, vellum, or tracing paper changes both the habitual perception of lines on a surface and the understanding of what exactly drawing is. A variety of works from American and European artists like Barry Le Va, Dorothea Rockburne, Mario Merz, and Remo Salvadori is articulated in the light of contemporary critical debates, categories of architecture theory, and possible congruences with more recent practices (such as Houston artist Joseph Havel’s work). As a literal breaking through the opacity of the sheet, transparency enigmatically disentangles the performative acts that constitute a drawing and expands its spatial and social dimensions.
drawing in Italian conceptualist art. The analysis starts from the work's
role at the 1976 exhibition 'Drawing / Transparence' and from its insertion in Penone's 1977 book 'Rovesciare gli occhi': these attestations allow to place the work within the poetics and the cultural references of the young artist. In this perspective, the analysis of the visual sources from the Windsor drawings by Leonardo in the series of six sheets, either collages or drawings, must be related to the works that since 1968 show the artist’s specific attention to this Old Master. The survey of the ways in which Penone uses these sources highlights the crucial passage of 1973, when the artist assumes the «conceptual» character of Leonardo’s draftsmanship to insert figuration and autography in his own works. Few years later a direct development of this processing results in the series of drawings of the air movements linked to the terracotta entitled Soffio, and included in the catalogue of the important exhibition of Penone set up in Essen in 1978. In this case Penone copies, assembles and reinvents the same Leonardo’s drawings, using traditional graphic techniques and stylisms, clarifying the reasons for adopting a specific language that legitimizes, as had already happened in nuce within Cambiare l’immagine, figurative drawing.
A lecture addressing transparency as a material and conceptual device in the drawing practices of the 1970s. The use of transparent and translucent supports like glass, vellum, or tracing paper changes both the habitual perception of lines on a surface and the understanding of what exactly drawing is. A variety of works from American and European artists like Barry Le Va, Dorothea Rockburne, Mario Merz, and Remo Salvadori is articulated in the light of contemporary critical debates, categories of architecture theory, and possible congruences with more recent practices (such as Houston artist Joseph Havel’s work). As a literal breaking through the opacity of the sheet, transparency enigmatically disentangles the performative acts that constitute a drawing and expands its spatial and social dimensions.