Enrico Baj, 79, Italian anarchist artist
Hoodude
VARESE, Italy (AFP) - Controversial Italian painter and sculptor
Enrico Baj died at home in Vergiate, northern Italy, on Sunday night,
his entourage announced. He was 79 years old.
Baj is best known for his collages of ridiculous-looking generals made
from shards of glass, scraps of flowery material and shells -- all
decorated with medals.
Born in Milan in 1924, Baj graduated from the renowned Brera art
school in the northern Italian city before establishing himself as a
self-styled libertarian anarchist who was rarely far from controversy.
Already in 1952 he published his manifesto of nuclear painting,
against academia and geometric abstraction.
In 1961 his "Big Antifacist Collective Painting", a collective work
criticising the war in Algeria, was confiscated by the Italian
authorities and spent the next 25 years gathering dust in a Milanese
cellar. Today the work is on display at Strasbourg's modern art
museum.
At the Venice Biennale of 1964, he responded to requests to cover up
his generals' offending chests by buying some black sticky tape.
"I applied it in the shape of a cross on the censored parts," the
artist said. "The crosses immediately became (swastikas) in the eyes
of the viewer, symbols of cultural oppression."
Baj's preferred targets were arrogance and violence, which he always
took on with gleeful irony and satire.
"Baj's playful and ironic side masks a constant and coherent
engagement against all the forms of destructiveness and oppression
that man inflicts on man," French surrealist Andre Breton commented.
--
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
- Juan Ramón Jiménez
James Hall
"Hoodude" ...
> Italian anarchist artist Enrico Baj dies at 79
> ...
> Baj's preferred targets were arrogance and violence, which he always
> took on with gleeful irony and satire.
>
> "Baj's playful and ironic side masks a constant and coherent
> engagement against all the forms of destructiveness and oppression
> that man inflicts on man," French surrealist Andre Breton commented.
My type of MAN.
JHall.
Bill Schenley
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