Prato, the archive-library of Lara Vinca Masini moves to the Luigi Pecci center

by time news

June 4, 2021 – 5:33 pm

A boundless amount of material that the scholar had decided to leave to Pecci before dying

of Corriere Fiorentino editorial staff

On the occasion of Archivissima 2021 the Center for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci di Prato announces the transfer to its spaces of the imposing archive-library of Lara-Vinca Masini, a noted Florentine art historian and militant critic disappeared on January 9 in Florence. With this transfer, the Prato museum considerably increases its documentary heritage and expands its scientific vocation and its nature as an institution for study, research and cultural production.


This important acquisition is part of a context of great attention and enhancement of the archival heritage, a fundamental part of the program of the Director Cristiana Perrella, as demonstrated by successful initiatives such as the public webinar entitled Archives and Centers of Contemporary Art Documentation. Practices and projects in comparison between museums and institutions in Italy promoted last April 28 by the institution together with theUniversity of Florence and which saw the participation of all the most important Italian institutions active in the field of conservation and study of documentation materials on contemporary art. The archives and materials preserved by them, which can be placed between the statute of the document and that of the work of art, will also be the protagonists of the exhibition Musei di carta, curated by Stefano Pezzato and Andrea Viliani, Curator and Head of CRRI (Research Center Castello di Rivoli) that the Pecci Center will inaugurate next autumn.

A fundamental contribution to the acquisition of the Lara-Vinca Masini archive-library was offered by the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze Foundation, whose collaboration with the scholar, supported in the last ten years through an annuity, was responsible for the conservation and arrangement of her conspicuous collection of study materials in view of the final destination at the Pecci Center, as established by her in 2010 with a deed of donation. This in fact, she envisaged that the archive would remain in her possession during her lifetime and that it be inventoried and ordered by her. I chose Pecci – Masini declared at the time of the donation – because I believe it is, has been and will be the only Tuscan regional center for contemporary art. The museum’s CID is a very important reality and I want my books to find a home there after my death.

Born in 1984 within the Municipality of Prato and subsequently merged into the Centro Pecci, the CID / Arti Visive is a unique and precious resource in Tuscany, which has about 66,000 volumes and a newspaper library with over 300 magazines, thanks to the funds acquired during the years (from that of Ferruccio Marchi, editor of Centro Di to that of Francesco Vincitorio, director of NAC magazine, from the archive of the artist Mario Mariotti to that of the architect Leonardo Savioli and his wife Flora Wiechmann, to name a few) . The arrival of the Masini archive will be an opportunity for a restructuring of its spaces, with 700 square meters of reading and consultation rooms that will be reopened to the public of Italian and international students and scholars in the next year, with the aim of making the collected and stored materials increasingly accessible, making them living material, the source of new ideas and new thinking about art, and to consolidate the role of the Pecci Center within a network of cultural institutions based on research, according to the programmatic lines of the director Cristiana Perrella. The materials of the Masini legacy follow the order conceived by the Florentine scholar and are divided into thematic sections, artistic movements, art and architecture criticism and publications..

Art exhibitions with publications and documents of over 8000 artists and more than 2000 collective titles and major reviews are included; architecture and applied arts, with materials from over 700 architects, materials and design titles; artistic movements with titles of Art Nouveau, Futurism, Programmed Art, Visual and Concrete Poetry; hundreds of publications on art history and criticism, art and politics; art magazines with about 1200 periodicals; volumes, posters and documents accompanying Masini’s exhibitions and publications; a thousand graphics, 300 posters, 180 small works and author’s objects.

An artistic and cultural heritage of great interest that will not only be made available to scholars but, through particular initiatives, will also be made known to an increasingly vast public, both to further deepen and enhance this important figure within the panorama of national contemporary art both to generate a new thought on the present and the future by telling the fascinating study path of Lara-Vinca Masini.

June 4, 2021 | 17:33

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