• ART SECTION

    Collections

The first nucleus
The first nucleus of works that will constitute the future Art Section of the CSAC began to be collected starting from 1968, whren a series of exhibitions dedicated to contemporary art were planned within the Institute of Art History of Parma.

The project, proposed by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle on model of US collections, is not only to investigate the contemporary through the most recent cristical methodologies, but above all to create a pubblic collection of art closely connected to teaching and research, and therefore to the univesity word.

The exhibitions
The first exhibitions were mostly dedicated to artists linked to Pop Art, which, especially after the 1964 Venice Biennale, had become a reference point in Italy as well, but with different interpretations. Here then are the exhibitions dedicated to Pop artists.
Concetto Pozzati (1968), Mario Ceroli (1969), a Lucio del Pezzo (1970), Virginio Ferrari (1971), Mario Schifano (1974), Emilio Tadini (1975), the Spanish Rafael Canogar and the English painter, sculptor and engraver Joe Tilson.

Acquisitions
Following those first exhibitions, the artists donated a significant work of their own to the University’s collection, thus numerous important works became part of the heritage. Acquisition strategies changed at the beginning of the 1980s, when the exhibitions organised by what had by then become the University’s Communication Studies and Archive Centre proposed the presentation of substantial nuclei of works donated to the CSAC. By 1977, the Art section already counted over 200 works by 107 artists, most of them donated by the artists themselves and some of them arrived through the fruitful relationship established with some of Italy’s leading gallerists

The artistic heritage
At the CSAC, the panorama of post World War II Italian artistic culture is represented: realism with Renato Guttuso, abstraction with Carla Accardi, Emilio Scanavino, Mario Radice, Nicola Carrino, the informal with Giuseppe Santomaso and Arnaldo Pomodoro, arte povera with Mario Ceroli, the conceptual with Alighiero Boetti, to name but a few. The uninterrupted progress of acquisitions has brought the Art Section to over 1,700 paintings, 300 sculptures, 17,000 drawings and a substantial bibliography and documentation linked to many funds, fundamental tools for study, teaching and research.

See the art section catalogue

  • CSAC - Art section

The artists
Artists not only did the artists from those first exhibitions donate a work or a small significant nucleus of their own cultural development to the University collection, but some authors also supplemented their holdings with more recent works, but above all with pieces that documented the entire course of their own development. Thus, works such as Egg (1961) by Tilson, La grande Cina (1967) by Ceroli, Disoccupazione (1969) by Canogar, Il sentimento della rivoluzione (1973) by Melotti, Decomposizione del verde (1958) and Canale nero (1953) by Birolli become part of this artistic heritage, Superficie opaline (1975) by Castellani, Early Dynastic (1971) by Paolini, as well as the 30 paintings and 300 drawings by Carlo Mattioli, shown in the exhibition dedicated to him in 1983, the works of Gentilini, Tadini, Padova, Sironi with over 500 pieces, and Lucio Fontana. Also, Vasco Bendini, Alberto Sughi, Virginio Ferrari.

The definitive location
The works, first housed in the premises of the Palazzo della Pilotta and later in the Padiglione Nervi, have since 2007 been reunited in the definitive location of the Abbazia di Valserena, stored in rooms with constant temperature and humidity and in drawers, and are the subject of research studies and loans for exhibitions. The cataloguing and monitoring of the heritage are fundamental activities for the correct use and conservation of the materials, and to this end, filing programmes have been developed not only for the complete description of the works, but also for their management, and collaborations have been set up with the Chemistry and Physics Departments of the University of Parma for the diagnostics of various cases of degradation (in progress or possible in the future).

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