Color as event. Peggy Guggenheim and Edmondo Bacci in post-war Venice – Venice – Arte.it

Venice – In a Venice that is changing its skin, still scarred by war but crossed by a new energy, color becomes a promise. In the 1950s, between quiet streets and improvised studies, Venetian painting sought a way out of tradition, while the gaze of an American collector intercepted a talent destined to remain on the margins of the official narrative of the twentieth century. It is in this space of possibilities that the meeting between Peggy Guggenheim ed Edmondo Bacciin the middle of the documentary Peggy Guggenheim and Edmondo Bacci: color and lightdirected by Costanza Madricardo and produced by Maco Film, broadcast on Sky art valley December 7, 2025all 21.15.The film takes us back to a Venice that is now far in time, but is decisive for the history of post-war art. Born in the lagoon in 1913 and educated at the Academy of Fine Arts, Edmondo Bacci spent the first years of his career in a phase of restless research. After a debut marked by figurative results, his painting gradually evolves towards abstraction, going through cycles dedicated to the Venetian industrial world, construction sites and factories, before arriving at a radically new language. Joining the spatial movement, led by Lucio Fontana, marks a decisive turning point for Bacci. It is in this context that the Avvenimenti were born, works in which color loses any descriptive function and establishes itself as an autonomous matter, full of energy and light. The canvases become surfaces crossed by chromatic explosions, visual events that seem to challenge the boundaries of traditional painting and transform space into a dynamic field. Peggy Guggenheim immediately recognizes the power of that work. Her attention to Bacci is not just the gesture of a collector, but the signal of a vision capable of reading the present before it becomes history. Guggenheim’s interest opened an international horizon for Bacci, culminating in a personal exhibition in New York in the mid-1950s, at a time when few Italian artists managed to cross the Atlantic with such a personal language. The documentary reconstructs this encounter through the ideal dialogue between artist and collector, supported by the testimonies of curators and collectors who live and work in Venice today.

What emerges is the portrait of a shy artist, far removed from the dynamics of protagonism, and at the same time of a Venetian art system that in those years was able to intercept the most advanced tensions of international research. Peggy Guggenheim & Edmondo Bacci: color and light is not limited to describing a relationship between art and patronage, but restores the climate of an era in which painting still seemed to be able to reinvent itself. A time when color was not a decoration, but the primary material of visual thinking. The documentary will be shown in theaters with two special screenings: Thursday, December 4, 2025 at Dante cinema from Mestre at 7 p.m. and Monday, December 8 at Giorgione cinema from Venice at 9 p.m.