Riassunto delle puntate precedenti

“Dear Dr. Stame, I would like to write to you as professor Vasco Bendini suggested, who has identified you as one of the people most attentive and sensitive to the problems of the figurative arts in Bologna. Professor Bendini also tells me that his is one of the few truly 'current' collections in Bologna.” It was November 1965 when this letter from the young Roman gallerist Fabio Sargentini arrived at Palazzo Bentivoglio, in the apartment of the Bolognese Antonio Stame (1909-2000), who long ago made his home on the main floor a place dedicated to the art of his time. For more than forty years, from 1946 to 1989, in fact, the private collection of Antonio Stame — articulated and “current”, as indicated by Bendini, who had his own studio inside the building — was the manifestation on the wall of a long intellectual adventure, from youthful enthusiasm cultivated in the bohemian living room hosted with his first wife Anna Maria Crocioni (1910-1978), to the more committed and mature collecting season together with his colleague notary Vincenzina Lanteri (1929-2019), to whom he was linked starting in 1961. \n With this new winter exhibition hosted in its underground spaces, Palazzo Bentivoglio wants to reconnect once again with the history of the building and make known to the public the unprecedented story of an art collection created and grown within these walls, in decades crucial for artistic research and for the establishment of the contemporary art market in Italy. Today fragmented into various properties, Italian and foreign, the Stame-Lanteri collection covered with its three hundred works the vast territory that lies between the historical avant-gardes — in particular Dada-Surrealism — and the return to the figuration of the Sixties and Seventies, passing through abstract and informal experiences. The proximity to scholars and intellectuals, first of all Francesco Arcangeli in Bologna and Arturo Schwarz in Milan, as well as the constant updating of pioneering exhibitions and critical reevaluations, allowed the Stames to constitute a collection in step with their times, but guided by a clear independence of judgment, where monographic insights and works representative of research that were distant from each other could coexist. The readiness to accept the news and the finesse of many of the acquisitions, now visible in the exhibition, confirms the peculiar physiognomy of Stame within the medium Italian collecting scene of those years, all the more precious as it is still little investigated in detail. \n In bringing back to Palazzo Bentivoglio a selection of sixty representative works, that formerly belonged to the Stame-Lanteri collection, the decision to think of the rooms and walls of the basement as displays for small dossiers and monographic groups highlights the convergence of the choices of collectors towards some specific junctions of artistic research of the last century. It thus makes it possible to recognize both the critical coherence and the autonomous deviations that were upstream of their desires. Exposed by Ferruccio Laviani against a backdrop of draped fabrics, the works return to interacting with each other years later, inviting the visitor to reconstruct conceptual ties and formal suggestions. As is the case with sheets lying on furniture in long-uninhabited houses, curtains sometimes show the emergence of a form: the photographic imprint of a door, a name, a sign on the wall are ghostly images of the place, inside the building, to which the collection belonged for a long time. Borrowing the title of Gianfranco Baruchello's small plexiglass from 1965, exhibited in the second room, it is therefore easy to read the exhibition as a very personal, unpublished summary of previous episodes.