Maria Lai was born in 1919 in Ulassai in Sardinia and grew up with an innate artistic spirit. It was while posing for Francesco Cuisa, commissioned to paint a portrait for her dead sister, that she met the world of art, from which she would never detach herself. Salvatore Cambosu, her teacher at Cagliari secondary school, discovered her sensitivity [...]
Niki de Saint Phalle (Neuilly-sur-Seine 1930 - San Diego 2002), was born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle in France but soon moved to New York, where she began a career as a model, appearing on the covers of Vogue and Life, and became an actress. In the early 1950s (married with a child) she suffered from [...]
Palma Bucarelli (Rome, 16 March 1910 - Rome, 25 July 1998) was a critic and art historian, a well-known Italian museologist, and one of the most important museum directors. Bucarelli is a figure of enormous importance: in an era and in a rather male-dominated panorama she managed to make her way and operate with great innovation and independence, promoting [...]
Rosalind Krauss (Washington 30 November 1941) is an American art critic and academic, professor of art history at Columbia University in New York. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Krauss began contributing articles to art magazines such as Art International and Artforum. He distinguished himself early on for his commitment to minimal art [...]
Anna Banti, born Lucia Lopresti (27 June 1895, Florence, 2 September 1985, Marina dei Ronchi, Massa), was the free spirit who stole the heart of her art history professor, Roberto Longhi. She became financially independent thanks to her writing and decided to devote herself completely to it with the stage name Anna Banti, "my real name, the one that was not given to me by my family nor by the [...]
Lea Buoncristiano (Naples, 5 March 1936 - Milan, 20 October 2020). Her harsh and rigorous character enabled her to make her way in the art world of the 1960s, which was still profoundly male-dominated at the time. She was especially involved in the avant-garde of programmed and kinetic art and, alongside the master Giulio Carlo Argan, in 1964 she designed the magazine "Linea [...]
Virginia Dwan (Minneapolis, 1931) is an American patron, philanthropist and visionary art collector. Founder of the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, she is the former owner and executive director of the Dwan Gallery with offices in Los Angeles and New York. With art dealer John Weber, her right-hand man, she organised exhibitions of the calibre of "My Country 'Tis of thee", held in November 1962 with which artists heralded the arrival of the Pop [...]
Denise René (Paris, 1913 - 2012) made a name for herself on the art scene thanks to her innate resourcefulness, which guided her in exhibiting the masters of the pre-war period and the new artists reinventing the Ecole de Paris. Fascinated first by geometric abstraction and then by kineticism, she believes that art must invent new paths in order to exist. She juxtaposes the non-figurative art of Manessier, Estève or Bazaine with the informal research of Fautrier or Dubuffet, convinced that emotion comes from the combination of forms and [...]
Ileana Sonnabend (Bucharest, 1914 - New York, 2007) is remembered among the world's leading gallery owners: with her 50-year career she helped shape the course of contemporary art in Europe and the United States. She introduced American Pop Art and Minimalism to Europe, representing the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtestein, Tom Wesselman, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris and John McCracken. In the 1970s she became an advocate of Art [...]
Iris Clert (Athens, 1917 - Cannes, 1986), a gallery owner of Greek origin but naturalised French, was one of the most important personalities in the mid-twentieth century European art scene, active in the forefront of the French Resistance. Heralded as a "signature - dealer", she surrounded herself with Nouveaux Réalistes including Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman and César but welcomed [...]