Antonio Ligabue

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Antonio Ligabue (* December 18 - according to other information on December 12 - 1899 in Zurich , Switzerland , † May 27, 1965 in Gualtieri , Italy ) was an Italian artist .

Life

Antonio Ligabue was born in Zurich in 1899. The circumstances of childhood and youth, like much in his biography, are in the dark. His mother, Maria Elisabetta Costa, a housemaid from Cencenighe Agordino ( Belluno province ) who emigrated to Switzerland , died early. The father is unknown. Ligabue came to various foster families, including in St. Gallen, then to the orphanage of Marbach , from which he was expelled at the age of 15 for poor management. At the age of 18 he was forcibly interned in the St. Pirminsberg psychiatric institution in Pfäfers because of behavior problems , and two years later he was expelled from Switzerland for vagrancy and petty crime - most recently living in Romanshorn .

On August 19, 1919, he was taken against his will to Gualtieri, where his mother's first husband, Bonfiglio Laccabue, lived. At that time he only spoke Swiss German , no Italian. Ligabue rejected his stepfather all his life and called himself Ligabue in order to distance himself from the surname Laccabue assigned to him . In the small town he became a suspicious outsider and eccentric, living lonely like a savage for years in a hut in the forest on the banks of the Po, crammed with his own clay sculptures . He used his plastic and drawing talent as a poster painter for visiting showmen, otherwise he earned a living as a mocked day laborer and road construction worker.

Discovery by Marino Mazzacurati

The painter Marino Mazzacurati (1907–1969), who was then living in Gualtieri and one of the founders of the Scuola Romana , went to Ligabue in his hut and gave him access to his studio. Without envy he recognized Ligabue's original and unadulterated talent. Ligabue quickly learned how to use oil paints and other techniques, but soon fell out with Mazzacurati. The two reconciled, but from now on they went their separate ways, with Mazzacurati remotely supporting Ligabue, who was obviously mentally battered, stone-beating himself and tormented by fits of despair and paranoid. During the war years Ligabue was temporarily housed in psychiatric hospitals. To distinguish himself from his surroundings, he used a mixed idiom of German and Italian that was only partially understandable for others. The German occupiers noticed this, and he was forced to work as a translator for the Wehrmacht , which was not conducive to his popularity in the Gualtieri of the post-war period.

In 1961 Ligabue had the first exhibition of its own in Rome, which suddenly made him famous beyond the borders of Italy. He could not handle the money that was now flowing in abundance, and the lonely man continued to abuse and suspect those around him of wanting harm to him. He died in the Gualtieri poorhouse on May 27, 1965, while an exhibition of his paintings was taking place in Reggio Emilia . Since then, his reputation as one of the most important Italian artists of " Art brut " has been established.

Ligabues art style

The Ligabue style could be described as a mixture of Henri Rousseau , Vincent van Gogh and Expressionism . Nonetheless, the view that it is a matter of “naive painting” is not correct, as it lacks the evoked idyll. Subjects of the picture are largely nature and hunting scenes, tigers tearing their prey, and sometimes landscapes and townscapes of the Po plain around Gualtieri. What is striking is the large number of self-portraits always from the same perspective. Ligabue often portrays himself with a housefly on his face or temple: a reference to the fact that he himself was aware that he was something outside of the "normal". It is said that he repeatedly hit himself with stones on a place on his head where "the bad thoughts" were. This wound can often be seen in his self-portraits.

In the city of Gualtieri , a museum with paintings from the Ligabue estate was opened.

Movie and TV

literature

  • Anita Guglielmetti: Antonio Ligabue. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . July 10, 2006 , accessed May 9, 2020 .
  • Karin Kavelin Jones: Beast in the Mirror: The Life of Outsider Artist Antonio Ligabue . Capra Press, Santa Barbara 1997, ISBN 978-0-88496-424-7 .
  • Antonio Ligabue: Homage to the artist on his 100th birthday , exhibition catalog Kunsthaus Zürich, 14. – 17. January 1999, OCLC 637774304 .
  • Hannes Binder , Giuseppe Zironi: Antonio Ligabue: From the agony of an artist's life . Text by Giuseppe Zironi, idea and pictures by Hannes Binder, graphic novel. Publishing house Jacoby & Stuart, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-941787-87-2 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ligabue, Antonio
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Laccabue, Antonio (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian artist
DATE OF BIRTH December 18, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich , Switzerland
DATE OF DEATH May 27, 1965
Place of death Gualtieri , Italy