Lea Buoncristiano (5 March 1936 – 20 October 2020), known as Lea Vergine, was an Italian art critic, essayist, and curator.
Biography
Naples: childhood, youth, and early exhibitions
Lea Buoncristiano was born in Naples on 5 March 1936, where she was raised by her grandparents who took her away from her mother, whom they considered to be too humble of a background.Marco Belpoliti, Lea Vergine, bellezza inquieta, su doppiozero.com, 21 ottobre 2020 She received her first schooling from a private teacher.Lea Vergine, L’arte non è faccenda di persone perbene, conversazione con Chiara Gatti, Rizzoli, Milano, 2016, p. 60. She then attended the Liceo Umberto I, where she formed a close relationship based on mutual esteem with her Italian teacher,Januaria Piromallo, Lea Vergine, una donna dal carattere rigoroso ma che rimase sempre fuori dagli schemi, su ilfattoquotidiano.it, 21 ottobre 2020. Teresa Benevento. She enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy, which she left at the age of 19 to start writing for local newspapers.Lea Vergine, su artdirectory-marussi.it, 20 ottobre 2020. URL consultato il 23 ottobre 2020 (archiviato dall'url originale il 27 ottobre 2020) Vergine married Adamo Vergine at a very young age in the same year and kept his surname even after their separation.
Her first article of art criticism was published in 1959 in I 4 Soli, a bilingual avant-garde magazine founded in 1954 and directed by the painter Adriano Parisot.I 4 soli: pagine d’avanguardia degli anni ‘50, in «La Repubblica», 28 ottobre, 1989 Her collaboration with I 4 Soli, which lasted until 1960, brought her into contact with intellectuals and young critics interested in the creation of a "review of current art" (as the magazine's cover states) that would establish a decisive link between Italian and French contemporary art.
Vergine was driven by an interest in current actualities and a "desire to be in the midst of what is happening";Lea Vergine, L’arte non è faccenda di persone perbene, conversazione con Chiara Gatti, Rizzoli, Milano, 2016, p. 70. Attentive to the new trends in the art scene of her city, in 1963 she wrote Undici pittori napoletani di oggi (Eleven Neapolitan Painters of Today),Lea Vergine, Undici pittori napoletani di oggi, Arte tipografica, Napoli, 1963 a text that collected the work of artists including Emilio Notte, Vincenzo Ciardo, Giovanni Brancaccio, Domenico Spinosa, Corrado Russo, Raffaele Lippi, Armando De Stefano, Renato Barisani, Carlo Alfano, Carmine Di Ruggiero, and Gianni Pisani, with a preface by art critic Giulio Carlo Argan.Eleonora Barbieri, La mia vita tra gli artisti che non sono per bene, in Il Giornale, 10 novembre 2016
In the same years, Vergine started to collaborate with the private gallery Il Centro (founded in 1960 by Renato Bacarelli and the brothers Arturo and Armando Caròla), where she started to collaborate in the organisation of some exhibitions, such as the 1963 solo exhibition of Lucio Fontana, presenting seventeen Spatial concepts in between 1952 and 1962.Lea Vergine, Parole sull’arte, Il Saggiatore, Milano, 2008, p.11 These were the years in which Fontana was working on the "ciclo dei buchi" (cycle of holes, 1949–1968) and the "ciclo dei tagli" (cycle of cuts, 1958–1968). The reactions to the exhibition revealed a still profoundly chauvinist approach to society and the art world. The critic Luigi Compagnone accused Vergine in an article in Il Tempo of sexual perversion for having spoken of "holes" referring to the artist's work.Marco Belpoliti, Lea Vergine, bellezza inquieta, su doppiozero.com, 21 ottobre 2020Stefania Gaudiosi, Lea vergine | 12 | Lucio Fontana a Napoli, su Youtube, 8 Luglio 2019, URL consultato il 23 ottobre 2021
In 1965, Vergine presented at Il Centro the exhibition on MIDAntonio Barrese, Autenticità e datazione delle opere. Parla il gruppo MID, in Artribune, 1 August 2015(Mutation, Image, Dimension), a group of visual experimenters who presented their poetic and programmatic statementsLea Vergine, Parole sull’arte, Il Saggiatore, Milano, 2008, pag. 12 Antonio Barrese, membro del MID.MID: Gruppo fondato nel 1964, composto da Antonio Barrese, Alfonso Grassi, Gianfranco Laminarca, Alberto Marangoni. Antonio Barrese, a member of the MID, recalls: "Lea Vergine ... was in some way our vestal."F. Agrifoglio, Il gruppo MID raccontato da Antonio Barrese, in collezionedatiffany.com, 7 January 2016 The last exhibition curated by Vergine at Il Centro, in the new premises in via Carducci, was Napoli '25/'33, in 1971. The group exhibition was born with the intention of bringing to light artists who were active in Naples during Fascism and who had been marginalised because of their political opposition to the regime and their counter-current research.Tra gli artisti: Emilio Notte, Edgardo Curcio, Francesco Cangiullo, Luigi Crisconio, Mario Vittorio, Eugenio Viti, Edoardo Giordano, Saverio Gatto, Paolo Ricci, Giovanni Tizzano, Luigi De Angelis, Pepe Diaz, Carlo cocchia, Mario Lepore, Antonio d’Ambrosio, Guglielmo Peirce, Luigi Cosenza Lea Vergine reconstructed a critical historiography that for many decades "was to remain a manifesto against the cultural marginalisation of this city, a capital city that was removed and self-removed from the broader narrative of the history of Italian art in the 20th century".Andrea Viliani, Racconti di una cultura operante: Napoli, la capitale sempre contemporanea di Lea Vergine, in Lea Vergine, Napoli '25/'33, CLEAN Edizioni, Napoli, 2018, p. 7 On the occasion of the exhibition a catalogue was published by Il Centro Edizioni with photographs by Mimmo Jodice and Rocco Pedicini and a graphic design by Bruno Di Bello.Lea Vergine, Napoli '25/'33, CLEAN Edizioni, Napoli, 2018, p. 95
In the mid-1960s, Vergine began to commute between Naples and Rome, where she rented a flat near Piazza Navona. In the capital she was able to deepen her relationship with Giulio Carlo Argan and get to know Palma Bucarelli, director of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rossana Rossanda, Bruno Zevi and Fabio Mauri. She began a collaboration with Radio3, Rai's culture channel, interviewing authors and reporting on current exhibitions. In Rome she also frequented various artists, including the Piazza del Popolo group, but also numerous galleries such as La Tartaruga, L'Attico or Galleria Pogliani.Chiara Gatti, Lea Vergine, L’arte non è faccenda di persone perbene, Rizzoli, 2016, p.48.
In 1964, Argan invited Lea Vergine to design and direct the avant-garde magazine Lineastruttura.Lineastruttura, rassegna trimestrale di architettura, arti visive e design, Diaframma, Napoli, 1966–1967 On this occasion, she met Enzo Mari, who Argan engaged to take care of the graphics. The magazine was created as a quarterly review to offer the public a debate on new contemporary trends in architecture and design. Art critics such as Achille Bonito Oliva, Palma Bucarelli, Gillo Dorfles and Filiberto Menna participated. Only two issues were published between 1966 and 1967 by the Neapolitan publishing house Diaframma.
Milanese years
In 1966, Vergine moved to Milan. Silvana Mauri, publisher of Bompiani, hired her to present a book by Harold Rosenberg together with Umberto Eco and the collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. From these years onwards, Vergine's critical activity was consolidated through more assiduous collaborations with specialist publications, including the contemporary transdisciplinary culture magazine Marcatrè, founded by Eugenio Battisti, Domus and Data, a contemporary art magazine edited by Tommaso Trini. On behalf of the editor Giancarlo Bonacina, she edited the art section of Almanacco Bompiani for the 1968 and 1969 editions. She continued her collaboration with Radio3 and began to write articles for periodicals and newspapers such as Il Tempo illustrato, Paese Sera, and for the international avant-garde art magazine Metro, at the invitation of her friend Gillo Dorfles. She wrote reviews of exhibitions and books for the weekly La Fiera Letteraria and for linus, a monthly comics magazine. In the following years, she undertook long-lasting collaborations with national newspapers such as il manifesto and Il Corriere della Sera.
In Milan, she curated several exhibitions for Guido Le Noci's Galleria Apollinaire, Renato Cardazzo's Naviglio and Carla Pellegrini's Galleria Milano, where in 1969 she inaugurated Irritarte. Appunti per un'analisi delle comunicazioni irritanti. It featured works by Ay-O, Gianfranco Baruchello, Gerardo Di Fiore, Bernard Höke, Tetsumi Kudo, Otto Muehl, Gianni Pisani, Alina Szapocznikow, and Curt Stenvert, "desecrating and irritating objects (deep down)", united by their challenge to social conventions. The title of the exhibition stemmed from the choice of exhibiting works that would provoke a sense of bewilderment in the viewer, generating horror and reflections on death. On the evening of the opening, Otto Muehl carried out a performance (documented in photographs by Ugo Mulas) in front of the public, covering the gallery assistant with liquids and food. The exhibition triggered strong criticism for the crudeness of the works on display, as testified by the words of the journalist Cesare Garboli in Il Mondo: "When you leave ... after the visit, looking for a taxi, you don't know what depressed you more, whether the horror of the revolting, scandalous novelties, or a decrepit piety, on the contrary, domestic and vulgar."Cesare Garboli, Ha senso scatenare traumi con pupazzi?, «Il Mondo», 6 novembre 1969, in Bianca Trevisan "Una storia, molte storie. La Galleria Milano negli anni Sessanta e Settanta attraverso il suo archivio", 2020
Body art