When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
LA STAMPA

Francis Bacon, A Modern Master In Florence

Bacon's "Portrait of Henrietta Moraes", 1969, oil on canvas
Bacon's "Portrait of Henrietta Moraes", 1969, oil on canvas

FLORENCE - It is an obvious point, but holds a hidden meaning. The last century did not have many artists who merit the “adjectivization” of their name, like Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Rembrandt or Goya, to define an entire genre.

Writers have given us Kafkaesque and Chekhovian, but can we say “Baconian”? The current exhibition at Florence's Strozzina modern art museum offers Francis Bacon the ‘ancestor’ treatment, and includes his studio from Reece Mews in London.

And something from that well-trodden, metabolized world, with its muscular drawings by Michelangelo, reproduced in magazines and covered with fingerprints, photographs of ill-fated lovers, the "traitor" Lucian Freud, on a daybed that looks as if it came from some lost canvas, outdated ads... creates this original show, which not only boasts some of his important and rarely seen works, but above all, does not give us only the last (rather Marlboroughian) battered triptychs, which have been seen in so manyexhibits recently.

For example, the visionary Marching Figures of 1951 is extremely beautiful, showing diligent little soldiers marching into the distance, walking into one of those classic spiritualist “Bacon-style” cubes under the wild stare of a large frozen head, which some see as that of a polar bear, but which perhaps also refers to the mysterious alchemical meteorite of Dürer’s MelencholiaI.

Both possess the marvelous "eyeless stares" which the great critic Gilles Deleuze mentions in his famous thesis on how to make the visible invisible.

But above all, how did Bacon avoid illustration and figurative art, while still achieving “figuration?” It is illuminating, in front of his final canvases, left incomplete on easels in his studio, to see how his mental-manual laboratory worked.

That Bacon could have been “father” to many children and grandchildren is not a surprise. In recent years he has been dragged into dubiousshows-- for example, the Romeexhibit that arbitrarily and superficially lined him up with Caravaggio, another bad boy.

Even this show could basically be arbitrary (and it is, inevitably and rationally) and yet centrifugal, explosive and radiant. The chosen artists are not necessarily directly linked to or close to achieving the pictorial texture of the ‘maestro,’ so that the show is less educational than it might otherwise be. But perhaps this is fair after all.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Society

Genoa Postcard: A Tale Of Modern Sailors, Echos Of The Ancient Mariner

Many seafarers are hired and fired every seven months. Some keep up this lifestyle for 40 years while sailing the world. Some of those who'd recently docked in the Italian port city of Genoa, share a taste of their travels that are connected to a long history of a seafaring life.

A sailor smokes a cigarette on the hydrofoil Procida

A sailor on the hydrofoil Procida in Italy

Daniele Frediani/Mondadori Portfolio via ZUMA Press
Paolo Griseri

GENOA — Cristina did it to escape after a tough breakup. Luigi because he dreamed of adventures and the South Seas. Marianna embarked just “before the refrigerator factory where I worked went out of business. I’m one of the few who got severance pay.”

To hear their stories, you have to go to the canteen on Via Albertazzi, in Italy's northern port city of Genoa, across from the ferry terminal. The place has excellent minestrone soup and is decorated with models of the ships that have made the port’s history.

There are 38,000 Italian professional sailors, many of whom work here in Genoa, a historic port of call that today is the country's second largest after Trieste on the east coast. Luciano Rotella of the trade union Italian Federation of Transport Workers says the official number of maritime workers is far lower than the reality, which contains a tangle of different laws, regulations, contracts and ethnicities — not to mention ancient remnants of harsh battles between shipowners and crews.

The result is that today it is not so easy to know how many people sail, nor their nationalities.

What is certain is that every six to seven months, the Italian mariner disembarks the ship and is dismissed: they take severance pay and after waits for the next call. Andrea has been sailing for more than 20 years: “When I started out, to those who told us we were earning good money, I replied that I had a precarious life: every landing was a dismissal.”

Keep reading...Show less

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch

The latest