An exhibition at the Macro to discover the artist’s book, a delicacy of the twentieth century

The Macro of Rome is the most modernist of the Roman museums. Its director, Luca Lo Pinto, has just dedicated a room to highlight the 50 books and booklets that make up the Hanuman Books editorial collection that the Italian painter Francesco Clemente and the American art expert Raymond Foye had hatched in New York over the course of seven years, between 1986 and 1993. You enter the Roman room and step on the reproductions – photo posters invitations, dedications – of the materials relating to the archive of the collection unearthed by Lo Pinto in an American university. On the opposite wall, instead, the 50 fateful books are set within a horizontal glass structure, 49 of which in a paperback format and only one in a larger format. All invery spicy aroma of the avant-garde of the twentieth century dangling between art, literature and music. Works in English by Allen Ginsberg, our Sandro Penna, Francis Picabia, Jack Kerouac, René Daumal, the singer Patti Smith. Published in runs ranging from 500 to 3,000 copies, it is almost impossible to find them all together. Neither Clemente nor Foye have them all.

The one on display at the Macro is my collection. Except that the credit for completing it book after book belongs to the great Turin antiquarian scholar and bookseller Giorgio Maffei (who died in 2016), that master of modern books to whose memory this article is dedicated. And the more so he just left (The artist’s books that have made historyBibliographic Publishing) a book that brings together the very precious articles that Maffei had written over time for the magazine Wuz by Ambrogio Borsani to mark the history of this umpteenth delicacy of the twentieth century, the artist’s book precisely. In other words, a paper book but so desecrated and crumpled and reinvented by its author that it becomes each time an autonomous act of art. Abyssally different from traditional illustrated books, those that had a text on one page and an illustration on the next page, however beautiful. Anyone who does not know the history of twentieth century artist books does not know what is being lost. Well, we Italians owe our knowledge of that history one hundred percent to the genius of Giorgio.

Let’s go back to the Hanuman Books collection for a moment. I had identified its existence in a book by Borsani in which he mentioned that Maffei had proposed it in one of his catalogs. Convinced that those books had been sold, I telephoned his widow, Paola Maffei, who keeps the legacy and continues the work. But no, there were still on the shelves of Giorgio and Paola’s Turin house, in that raised room which is accessed by a short ladder and in which I spent many enchanting moments as well as ruining my pockets. It took me thirty seconds to decide to buy them. Two of the 50 books were missing from the collection put together by Giorgio. The valiant Paola has found them over time. When Lo Pinto called her to tell her she wanted to show Hanuman Books, she Paola told him she had sold them to me. At which Lo Pinto phoned me.

Yes, as for my collection of artist’s books, I learned everything from Giorgio, from reading his articles on Wuz, from our meetings in the room of the Turin house. Who else could I learn from exactly how he was born the mythological Twentysix Gasoline Stations from 1963, the book by the American artist Ed Ruscha who acts as the progenitor of the modern artist’s book? Born in Nebraska in 1937, Ruscha set out to travel – in the stretch that goes from his home in Los Angeles to that of his parents in Oklahoma City – the most famous American highway, Route 66, which has long been the vital nerve of the States. . The images that struck him the most were the petrol pump stations sometimes fallen into disuse that recurred along the way, images in the manner of an archeology of the modern. Well Ruscha did nothing but photograph them as they are, photographs in their own way icy that did not have the slightest claim to artistry. The result was a book published in 400 copies that Ruscha was selling to his friends for three or four dollars a copy (he will do two more editions later). In American libraries that book is sometimes found under the term “transport”. To buy a nice copy of the first edition today would take something close to 30 thousand dollars in sound. One masterpiece after another, Ruscha continued on that road for a long time. Except for the first two, and I don’t mind it, I have all of his artist’s books and I keep them in such quality that they are kept in an iron cabinet that I had Roberto Mora designed ad hoc.

Yet Giorgio’s footsteps on my library are even more marked on another artist’s book of the twentieth century, the fabulous Contemplations by the sculptor Arturo Martini, the tiny book of 1918 (14 cm high by 10 cm at the base) published in 40 copies of which only two survive and which I consider the most sacred book of the Italian twentieth century. Yes, even more than the first edition of Orphic songs by Dino Campana, of the first Gobettian edition of Cuttlefish bones by Eugenio Montale, of the Trieste novels by Italo Svevo. A book made only of signs imprinted in xylography on the paper, of full-page handwriting repeated and modified to the point of obsession, and whose musicality has generously written a scholar and collector, Maria Gioia Tavoni, as hypnotized as I am by that book. After that first and mysterious first edition, Martini will prepare a second and a third one (with important changes). The second edition of 1936 is very rare, also in the format of the first. Giorgio telephoned me to offer it to me. Time to catch my breath and immediately I said yes.