The exhibition “Armando Giuffredi. Drawings of a sculptor” opens today in Florence, curated by Andrea Bacchi and Roberto Cobianchi, with the help of the artist’s son, Augusto Giuffredi, who made the works available. Inaugurated in the afternoon, the exhibition will remain open until Sunday 31 July, in the headquarters of the Academy of the Arts of Design, in via Ricasoli 68. It is promoted by the Florentine institution itself, chaired by Cristina Acidini. A selection of drawings by the Emilian sculptor, medalist and xylographer Giuffredi (Montecchio Emilia 1909-1986) will be presented to the public for the first time.
Through about seventy watercolors, pencil and charcoal drawings and preparatory cartoons for sculptures in the round and reliefs, datable above all between the mid-30s and early 50s, the figure of Giuffredi the draftsman is outlined through the exhibition itinerary at within the historical and artistic context of Rome in the 1930s and 1940s, which proposed drawing as an increasingly autonomous and independent artistic form with respect to the final realization of a painting or sculpture.
Drawing. wrote the author in ’39, “it is the most genuine and aristocratic, most direct and immediate manifestation of the artist’s feeling, and is therefore the one that best reveals its qualities and even its defects”. The earliest nude studies from life exhibited here (1934-35) are marked by low-energy outlines and light shading. However, it is in the views of Rome in the early 1940s, executed in pen and fountain ink, that the imprint of the artistic avant-garde of the painters of the so-called Scuola di via Cavour and of the graphic stroke of Scipio, who was the real protagonist. (continues)
Also on display are drawings and sketches from life in pencil of animals made for Giuffredi’s first public commission in 1942: the two fountains of the Foro Mussolini, today Foro Italico: I pelicans, made of marble, and I cigni, which never saw the light because of the war. If in the real life pencil sketches of the animals Giuffredi still takes D’Annunzio’s favorite animal as a model, namely Renato Brozzi, in the drawings in which he elaborated the overall compositions, traced in pen and ink, the naturalistic data is transfigured.
Other preparatory drawings instead illustrate the operative modality to which Giuffredi followed in the execution of the large models from life of his works, especially for those in wood, a favorite material. For his one-to-one scale cartoons, preparatory for sculptures or reliefs, the sculptor developed a resolute and synthetic sign, different from the fluid or nervous one of life studies. From the private sheets on display, especially those in which he portrays his wife and children, a sincere feeling of conjugal happiness emerges together with a fresh and clear line.
The catalog, signed by the two curators of the exhibition, is published by Edifir-Edizioni Firenze and contains an essay by Roberto Cobianchi, “The drawings of armando Giuffredi: theory and practice” and one by Andrea Bacchi, “Invention and execution in the work of Giuffredi “. The volume is accompanied by a ‘notebook’ in which Giuffredi noted theoretical / critical reflections, and by a correspondence (1935-1947) between the sculptor and his friend, painter and sculptor Renato Marino Mazzacurati.