In this section, the concept of academism refers to those artists, born in the fifties and sixties ,who have borrowed their formal language from Scapigliatura, in painting and in sculpture, considering it as a fundamental and definitive conquest:
it became for them a stylistic must to ground one ‘s identity as artist, in order to be able to continue to define painting and sculpture in relation to visual phenomena, in a world in which naturalistic representation, regardless of how interpretatively it could be, would be always more belittled.
Some of them are self taught artists who have not received formal training under any particular Scapigliato master but they all have in common a full mastery of those means that have been elaborated by the innovative Scapigliati of the previous generations which they have elected as mentors.
In effects art is a transmission of technique.
To insure the survival of any revolutionary principle, its transmission to the future, teaching has to intervene.
Therefore any innovation in the art contains in itself a potentiality of academism. To this eternal law, neither Scapigliatura nor even Impressionism has been an exception.
This last chronological room presents a few examples of last generation of Scapigliati.
The selection is certainly not exhaustive, it would have be impossible to trace them all – but it is intended as a tribute to those who have continued in the movement aesthetics with major elegance and who have constituted what, at posteriori, appears as its last expression: they are petits maitres who if they do not belong to the avanguard, are nevertheless authors of valid works.

Close