Alberto Burri is synonymous with Città di Castello and in the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri its splendor is celebrated.
An exemplary path for numerous museum structures, it pays homage to the art of the great Alberto Burri, founder of post-war Italian art, narrating it punctually, in a creative and enveloping way.
These paintings without abstract titles but simply named based on the elements expressed in them: cellotex, wood, sack, metal, clay, tar etc. or based on color. Admiring Burri cannot ignore the observation of his painting in terms of structure, composition, form with which the artist expresses his singular pictorial language. The painting itself with its innovative grammar speaks to the public of all times and ages in a simple and immediate way using the material not as a medium but as an end.
Alberto Burri lived and worked regardless of criticism but certainly in his paintings, especially in the pictorial cycles expressed in the 11 rooms of the tobacco dryers, there are interpretations of travels, of books by authors cannibalized by his large tables that push to a reading of the artist in an existential key. Just think of the Metamorfex cycle inspired by Kafka. If his great success with the public was almost immediate, it is also true that the intellectual intelligentsia of the last century did not digest his stains well. Just think that when in 1959 the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome directed by Palma Bucarelli purchased a Grande Sacco by Alberto Burri, there was immediate controversy, exacerbated among other things by a parliamentary question wanted by the communist senator Umberto Terracini.
Many contemptuously defined him precisely as the artist of the sack.
What did Burri see in this worn, vile jute, torn in several parts surgically sewn with an iron file? It smells a lot like a Franciscan habit with rough sack patches, the only ones allowed by the seraphic father for the Order's clothes. Or maybe not. How much it smells of industrial development and the car boom that tar mixed with pumice and oil on canvas, which sticks the visitor to that wall asphalt. "I have been thinking for a long time about saying how things burn" ... right in the early fifties and for a decade Burro experimented with the numerous expressive possibilities of the combustion of various materials, almost an obsession.
A painter Burri who was not a painter, who did not use brushes, who shaped the material by destroying, setting fire, consuming and perhaps punching: a prisoner of war, worried about his professional future (he renounced his job as a doctor) or perhaps simply pervaded by the artistic fire. Over the years and with the lively cultural change, there has been a mature evolution in the perception of his works and the Umbrian Foundation, created by him, allows us to know not only the artist but also to accompany him in the different fortunes linked to specific political and social atmospheres. Burri's success was also helped by another great art, photography, which willingly documented his work; the photographer Ugo Mulas penetrated his intimacy, peeking into his laboratory that has a strong theatrical feel. Air, earth, fire, air, but not water in his work, who knows... Burri's legacy is transmitted to humanity today thanks to the commendable work of the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri which, in Palazzo Albizzini and in the Seccatoi del tabacco, accompanies the visitor on an artistic educational journey that is unique in the world and, above all, understandable to everyone, young and old, connoisseurs or not, curious explorers of the subject or enthusiasts of 20th century art.
Valentina Niccolai