Atelier and archive

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The studio of Alfredo Catarsini holds the artist’s important archive.
Documents, photographs, catalogues, articles, drawings, art books, letters, diplomas and honours make it possible to reconstruct his personality and the most telling events of a long life given wholly to art.

Alfredo Catarsini was not only a painter but also a writer and a man of culture, attentive and responsive. The archive holds the manuscripts of his short stories, the drafts of his two novels — one of them recently reissued by La Nave di Teseo — his diaries, and the articles he wrote for many years for local newspapers and cultural magazines. Dedicated folders hold the papers that, from the 1930s onwards, covered his exhibitions along with countless reports on the artistic and cultural life of the twentieth century.

Of great interest is the collection of every catalogue and brochure from the many exhibitions he took part in from 1927 onwards, together with the catalogues of artists he felt especially close to, and the correspondence he kept up with many of them.
There are numerous photographs of him and of his family, in which he appears first with the innocent air of a very young soldier and then as an artist sure of himself, portrayed in his old studio in via Regia and later in the one at Palazzo Paolina.
Telling, too, are the images of his exhibitions, from those of the 1930s to the last retrospective of 1991, and the sepia photographs of his young wife and of his daughter as a child.

The spell cast by the rooms where the archive is kept comes not only from the documents — of the first importance, and evoking a long and significant stretch of history — but from the air that still hangs between these walls. Looking at his easel, his palette, the few pieces of furniture, the traces of colour on the walls, we feel the intensity of a deep and honest search in painting to which Alfredo Catarsini gave his whole life.

Claudia Menichini

For information about visits click here

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