Renzo Vespignani, Untitled, Lithograph, 1988

Lithograph on Magnani-Pescia paper 310 gr/m2, paper size 58cm x 81cm, 53cmx 73cm . Excellent condition, no defects. Work number II second state 93/94; artist Signature ‘88 Renzo Vespignani, born Lorenzo Vespignani (Rome, February 19, 1924 – Rome, April 26, 2001), was a painter and engraver. His art was not limited to painting alone, he was an illustrator of many masterpieces. His work as a set designer was also important: he worked for “I giorni contati” and “L'omicidio” by Elio Petri, “Maratona di danza” and “Le Bassaridi” by Hans Werner Henze, “I sette peccati capitali” and “La madre” by Bertolt Brecht, “Jenufa” by Leoš Janácek. As an engraver he produced more than four hundred titles in etching, soft varnish and lithography. He began painting during the Nazi occupation, hiding with the engraver Lino Bianchi Barriviera, his first teacher. Other important points of reference, who influenced his artistic beginnings, were Alberto Ziveri and Luigi Bartolini, while, especially in his early paintings, the influence of expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix seems evident. His work, between '44 and '48, describes the attempt to resurrect an Italy destroyed by the war. In 1956, he founded, with other intellectuals, the magazine Città aperta, focused on the problems of urban culture. Among the artists close to him, we remember Giuseppe Zigaina (and the so-called Portonaccio School) and, after '63, those of the group called Il pro e il contro, founded by him together with Ugo Attardi, Fernando Farulli, Ennio Calabria, Piero Guccione and Alberto Gianquinto. Since 1969, Vespignani has been working on large pictorial cycles dedicated to the crisis of the affluent society: Imbarco per Citera (1969), concerning the intellectual class involved in '68; Album di Famiglia (1971), a polemical look at his personal daily life; Tra due guerre (1973-1975), an inflexible analysis of respectability and petty-bourgeois authoritarianism in Italy; Come mosche nel miele (1984), dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1983 he was commissioned to paint the August banner of the Palio di Siena, won by the Imperial Contrada della Giraffa. In 1991 he exhibited 124 works in Rome, including the cycle Manhattan Transfert[6], a critique of the unbearable existential delirium of the American way of life. In 1999 he was elected President of the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca and appointed Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. Vespignani passed away on April 26, 2001