Word: verzocchi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like many another self-made man, Milan Industrialist Giuseppe Verzocchi, 63, believes in hard work. As Italy's leading brickmaker, he also believes in bricks. Last year, barrel-shaped Giuseppe Verzocchi persuaded 72 of Italy's leading contemporary artists to paint pictures that 1) celebrated the virtues of work and 2) included, somewhere on the canvas, at least one brick. In exchange, he guaranteed them 100,000 lire ($160) apiece and the promise of a public showing...
Most of the artists threw Verzocchi's bricks into an obscure corner, but some, e.g., Massimo Campigli in his subtly lyrical The Architrave, managed to get a whole stack of them into their compositions. Antonio Donghi, whose meticulously realistic painting of a peasant woman rowing a boatload of faggots was one of the most popular in the show, had floated his brick miraculously on water...
Since the pictures were about work, Patron Verzocchi wanted to make sure that the worker got a chance to see them. He had chartered a train to carry 600 employees from his brickworks in La Spezia to the show. When it closes in October, Verzocchi intends to send the show on tour, later give most of the pictures to Italian factories to be hung in workers' canteens...
...pleased was Verzocchi with the response to his project that he was planning to launch a free weekly art review with himself as editor. To make life more pleasant for painters, he was also arranging to put up artists and their families free of charge in tents pitched in the gardens of his luxurious villa in the Dolomites. He had already started planning another brick-and-work show to be held at Milan's midsummer fair next year, was inviting sculptors as well as painters to participate. If & when he decides that artists have exhausted the subject of work...
...only one to turn him down: Milan's slow-working Giorgio Morandi (TIME, July 18, 1949), who loves to paint bottles as much as Industrialist Verzocchi loves to make bricks. He was unwilling...
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