Exhibition catalogue “Michelangelo Perghem Gelmi”, Palazzo Trentini, Trento, May 2003, TEMI Publishing House.
Courtesy of the Presidency of the Provincial Council of the Autonomous Province of Trento.
MICHELANGELO PERGHEM GELMI
The painting engineerCritical text by Elisabetta Staudacher
Michelangelo Perghem Gelmi’s advice to young people willing to pursue artistic studies is to draw as much as possible, as “style reveals itself through constant exercise”, he states. And then he continues, “One begins by imitating, copying, imitating again and again. Only in this way can style be acquired and refined, otherwise it will always be influenced by your passions and engagements”. One cannot improvise when it comes to art, and Perghem Gelmi knows this very well. This is why he decided to attend the Art Academy in Turin, the city he moved to from Trento to pursue his academic career, despite his innate talent as a caricaturist and a draftsman and a degree in architecture which led him towards this profession later on.
As he writes in the introduction to his solo exhibition “Perghem 80” (1981): “following my artistic inclination, I never wanted to be an engineer but an architect. I felt closer to its sister art, painting, which I had always pursued individually”.
His choice of studies, engineering, was forced on him by economic reasons. He was well aware that if he had chosen an artistic path, he would have been an excessive burden to his family. Despite his job as Assistant Professor at the Turin Polytechnic and his role as Chief of the technical office at the Harbour of Rijeka, in 1940 he applied to the “Accademia Albertina”, starting his year-and-a-half training period, interrupted by the outbreak of the war. He chose to attend the course of Enrico Paulucci, from the “The Turin Six” artistic group, rather than the painting course run by Felice Casorati, scholar of the pure form and the rational order of objects. Casorati focussed on French Impressionism as a way of liberating visual sensations against the fixed reality portrayed by the classics. With his artist friends Gigi Chessa, Francesco Mencio, Nicola Galante, Carlo Levi and Jessie Boswell, Paulucci got acquainted with the art critic Edoardo Persico, before he moved to Milan where he attracted a group of young artists, defined “chiaristi” (from “light”) for their tendency to tone down their palette until the complete dissolution of the forms, a very popular painting style for the Novecento artistic group. Looking at the Provence landscapes painted on aeroplane fabric in the years 1942-1943 while he was an officer in the Air Forces, the inevitable influences of the contemporary artistic movements is clearly detectable, although it is interpreted in a very personal way. He drew his inspiration from the “chiarista” landscapes of Francesco De Rocchi and Umberto Lilloni, but also from Cézanne’s Constructivism and the tones of Fauvism, which pervaded the work of his academy teacher. The thick brush-strokes, in soft warm-coloured tones, dispelled the fairytale atmosphere dear to the opposers of the Novecento group, concentrating on the physical and real space. The expanses of flowered fields are precious evidence of Perghem Gelmi’s painting period before his deportation to the Deblin-Irena prison camp in Poland. Perghem Gelmi had his first exhibition, a selection of watercolours and charcoal sketches originated during his long journey from Cannes to Tarnopol and his internment period, thanks to his commander-in-chief, a Viennese laywer not very impressed by Nazist methods. There was little colour, fading into the whiteness of the snow, which seemed to hint at the fact that the subjects themselves could suddenly disappear, swallowed by the whiteness of the paper. The silence originated by an imposed immobility was described through landscapes immersed in an unreal dimension, which resembled the condition of the painter, who, in the prison camp, devoted himself “to his beloved art full-time and without any survival problems”, as he himself relates when he thinks back at his experience in the camp, describing it as “an exciting time” when he could paint and draw without having to worry about his peacetime professional commitments.
His love for painting protected his soul from the hardship and the misery inflicted to prisoners in captivity. The surroundings turned into a study subject for his drawings, later to be published in the volume “From Cannes to Tarnopol” together with brief, inspired descriptions by his fellow prisoner Francesco Piero Baggini.
At the end of the war, Perghem Gelmi went back to his professional career in Turin, where he lived for a few years with his wife Antonietta and his first child Maria Rosa, before moving to San Juan in Argentina (from 1948 to 1955). What remains of this period of his life are some views of the Piedmont capital (“The Po’ River in Turin” and “The Great Mother of God”), and this time big, thick brush-strokes substitute the light touches and the blinding light of his Polish drawings. Clearly, the artist was in the process of assimilating the style he used during his stay in Provence, but at the same time, he was flirting with the volumes of Cèzanne and the Cubism of Picasso on the one hand; on the other, he leaned towards the thick strokes of Van Gogh. When he moved from Turin to Argentina, his trait became more simple. The sinuous female nudes inspired by the Thaitian women of Gaugin (“A model”), which had substituted geometrical faceted figures (“Country Gentleman” – 1946), were now replaced by essential figures created by strong and forceful traits (“The Gossips”).
The clothes, the architecture and the landscape elements lost definition, as in “Calle Tucuman”, a painting which won a prize at the Autumn Exhibition in San Juan in 1955. Perghem Gelmi seemed to be moving closer to a simpler representation, almost childish at times, possibly partly influenced by the presence of his children. On the birth of his daughter Maria Guglielmina and of his son Mario, born after Perghem Gelmi’s return in Italy, Perghem Gelmi was seized by the desire to use a code understandable by children. In December 1955, back in Trento, he chose the city as the main protagonist of his paintings and followed its developments with the caring attention of a loving parent. He observed the city with its festive crowd in the historical centre, the changes of post-war Trento with its Piazza Duomo full of little colourful cars resembling tin toy cars, young people ice-skating by a frosted Port’Aquila like light flying figures in a Chagall painting.
It’s with the painting “Santa Trinità”, presented at the Provincial Exhibition of Figurative Art in 1961 and again at the Exhibition of Trentino Artists at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 1963, that Perghem Gelmi showed the public a different view of Trento. The slanted architecture, represented all gathered around the church façade in vibrant tones and strong contours, showed an apparently deserted place. The artist took over the city spaces and placed existing buildings in unreal circumstances, thus anticipating the course that his art would follow from the beginning of the 1970s, when he put an end to his engineering and architecture work in order to devote himself entirely to painting: a Surrealist artist, free from preconceived ideas, depicting an unreal world dominated by imaginary plants and human figures, living together in a perfect balance. The geometrical side of his mind, a clear heritage of his technical training, influenced his conception of form and mingled with his colourful and biting creative processes. “I have always collected and investigated those perceptions and suggestions which re-create a new version of reality. I feel that the conventional order of things, with its objective appearances, does not satisfy me anymore, it kills imagination”, he explains. In his ambitious task of creating new spaces, he feels free to populate them with creatures of his imagination and dreams full of a blinding lightness.
According to Serravalli, it is as if Odillon Redon’s symbolist eyes were observing surreal and naif situations à la Rosseau: The Customs Officer and Ligabue, academic memories of Perghem Gelmi, which reveal his ability in re-visiting artistic myths universally known. His obsession for the “eye”, which he defines as “the most beautiful form in nature”, is a recurrent theme and is already present in 1962. During the opening of the Piedicastello kindergarten, which was based on his project, he explained the importance of the central structure of the building, which enabled the teachers to “keep an eye” on the children all day. The Perghem Gelmi Trust, housed at the MART (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) since 1995, contains a plastic model and other material concerning the kindergarten project.
After the artist’s death, his family donated to the Museum over 1,400 technical drawings, sketches, drafts, and plastic models of the most relevant public and private works that Perghem Gelmi worked at in Trentino: the Levico and Merano spa buildings (1958 and 1960), the ONAIRC kindergarten in Trento (1964), reminiscent of Le Corbusier, the housing block in Norge on Monte Bondone (approx. 1966), the ECA housing estate in Trento (1969). Among his works, there are some projects which were never realized but which are still very up-to-date, such as “Ideas for Trento – The Future”, which won an award during the National Congress of Town-Planning organized by the municipality of Trento in 1967, the underground parking space at the Canossian Convent at Piazza Venezia in Trento (1970), the parking space above the railway station and the roofing of the station itself (1983). Even in this field, Perghem Gelmi stood out for his effective and clever ideas, so much so that some of his projects are still very innovative today. His project “Ideas” for the site of the former Santa Chiara Hospital in Trento, for instance, included both an underground tunnel connecting Piazza Fiera with the hospital in order to beat the traffic problems, a parking space counting 1,300 lots and an auditorium with 2,000 seats, not yet present in the city.
Thanks to his love for the environment and his life-long passion for sports, he thought up a series of enviromentally friendly housing blocks on Monte Bondone: simple forms, contained sizes and resistant natural materials such as wood and stone.
His ironical, mocking style comprised not just unreal, imagined figures but also popular figures of the local social scene, who became the unaware protagonists of a caricature exhibition called “Many minds, many ideas”, organized at the Il Castello art gallery in 1976. The idea can be traced in his intention to make use of his caricature talent which he discovered to have as a student and which he used in the 1960s to portray famous Italian politicians.
Once again his audience was stunned by a body of work of extremely expressive power and full of psychological insight. His hidden goal was to provoke the reactions of eminent people - professionals, intellectuals and politicians, who were supposed to design the future of the city of Trento but were not so full of new ideas and perspective. This theme is very dear to the artist, who is afraid that the vitality of the city may be suffocated by the incompetence and faults of its administrators. That is why the following year he organized the exhibition “Tribute to Trento”, again at the Il Castello art gallery. According to Franco de Battaglia, the art critic who best followed, loved and understood his works (and who became the subject of the portrait “Profession and passion” in 1990), the exhibition constituted “not just an artistic event, but also a social occasion”. The artist wanted to convince Trento citizens that the city was like a house to be lived in, a place where the artisanship dimension must be cherished. That is the reason why, in a very provocative way, he represented Trento as an empty space, a warning for the citizens: this was how Trento could become, if we did not concentrate on the safeguard of its artistic heritage. The buildings were depicted in simple, thick traits, already used in paintings dating back twenty years, when he rediscovered his home town on his return from Argentina. He used charcoal then; now all the buildings are coloured in bright tones, to remind us of enlivened spaces.
In 1981 the municipality of Trento hosts an important exhibition at the Regional Seat of the Trentino Government. There are seventy works, defined by the artist as “wide-eyed dreams dreamed out in total freedom, where the objects change their forms, their functions and their places”. This is the phase of Surrealism and magical, allegorical and ironical Symbolism, very much in the style of Savinio and Magritte, and his clear intention is to subvert conventional reality.
While he re-worked key masterpieces of the history of art such as the Leonardo’s Gioconda (“She and I”), Goya’s “Maya desnuda y vestida”, or a famous Modigliani nude, which is intruded upon by a strange “collectionist”’s figure. He creates paintings suspended between Surrealism and Iperrealism, such as “Eight Masked Friends”, “Anatomy Lesson”, based on the painting of the same name by Rembrandt. Here he portrayed eminent Trentino friends performing an autopsy. The title of the painting referred to his exposition in a shop window of the city centre on Shrove Tuesday 1983.
Two years later, the city celebrations for the anniversary of the birth of Bernardo Clesio ispired his creation of a massive panel, representing the Prince-Bishop judging the actions of his heirs, after hearing the account given by the Archibishop Gottardi, backed by a bunch of grey politicians. Yet again, he tried to provoke and shake his fellow citizens, defined by De Battaglia as “too complacent about themselves and their limits, incapable of ruptures or emotions or joys, unable of running risks or thinking big”.
In the late years of his life, Perghem Gelmi became quite intolerant towards opportunistic and unjust behaviours, he was disappointed by the fading values and the general disregard for little everyday pleasures, therefore he found refuge and drew his consolation from memories of more authentic places and people whom he met during his trips of the 1980s to Mexico, China, Peru and Bolivia. Natural landscapes, cultures and ways of living very different from Western culture are depicted with the intention of preserving impressions and images full of emotions and history, to prevent them from drowning in the futility of a world more and more detached from authentic values and principles.
His solid and sincere friendship with another painter, Giuseppe Anesi, became one of his only lifelines. They were present at exhibitions in Trento and Bolzano and he was also one of the subjects in the ironical re-working of Manet’s painting “Déjeuner sur l’herbe”, entitled by the artist “An Outing in the Countryside with Beppino and…”.
Perghem Gelmi died in the summer of 1992, while his painting “Veermer copies Picasso” represented his city at an exhibition organized by the two twin cities in Kempten, a painting which once again stood out as a proof of his genius, which stayed with him until the end.
archivioperghem@libero.it