1968-1969 A DONATION TO THE GNAM

At the request of Palma Bucarelli, between 1968 and 1969, Valeria Manzoni donated four Achromes to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.

On 2 May 1968, Palma Bucarelli, Superintendent of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome visited Valeria Manzoni in Milan. During this meeting she suggested a donation of a group of Achromes so that the artist would be well represented in the Gallery, as at that time it possessed only a set of Tavole di Accertamento (Works of Verification).

There followed intensive correspondence between the two women; the first letter confirmed the Manzoni family’s willingness to donate a splendid Achrome (kaolin on wrinkled canvas, 130 x 162 cm): “My children agree that we should donate the work you saw at my home”; the piece was valued at 300 thousand Lire.

In the June of that year, another exceptional Achrome in glass fibre on a light blue ground headed to Rome. In December, however, Palma was back on the attack: she also wanted a polystyrene work and a cottonwool Achrome “one of the most typical examples of Piero’s art”, but there were difficulties: a gallerist who had been lent the works by Valeria was late returning them.
By April 1969, all four works were finally at the GNAM; at the end of the month Palma wrote to the Minister: “The lady, mother of the artist who died in 1963, has therefore, with great sensitivity and generosity, responded to the desire I expressed to her to document in the Galleria Nazionale one of the most talented artists of our younger generation, already well-known as an exponent of the liveliest avant-garde and whose death was a great loss for Italian art”.