Date of Thesis

Spring 2020

Description

Tancredi Parmeggiani, born in 1927, gained notability with the help of his patron, Peggy Guggenheim. With an early affinity for drawing, there was no question that Tancredi (as he came to be known) would turn art into his career. Largely due to his early death in 1964 at the age of 37, Tancredi’s work has, for the most part, been forgotten, especially among Anglophone critics and historians. An important moment in his career took place in 1952 when, at the age of 25, he signed the fifth “Spatialist Manifesto,” deeming him a member of Lucio Fontana’s Spatialist Movement. The Post-War Italian movement, Spatialism, aimed to fuse art with science by producing modern visions of space. Throughout the 1950s Fontana and Tancredi developed unique forms of Spatialist art. Whereas Fontana’s art mainly characterized the silence and depth in space, Tancredi’s art portrayed nature as the principal expression of space. Drawing on various Italian language sources (as well as a few in English), my thesis examines the ways in which Tancredi’s “natural” Spatialism developed out of his student years and matured in the late 1950s. In closing, this thesis suggests that Tancredi’s form of Spatialism is equally as evocative of the movement as its founder’s, Lucio Fontana, and deserves recognition in the scholarly discourse surrounding Italian Post-War art.

Keywords

Tancredi, Modern Art, Italy, Spatialism, Lucio Fontana

Access Type

Honors Thesis (Bucknell Access Only)

Degree Type

Bachelor of Arts

Major

Art History

Second Major

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First Advisor

Roger Rothman

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