To mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, Electa is devoting a volume in the A-Z series to Enrico Baj (Milan, 31 October 1924 – Vergiate, 16 June 2003), a versatile figure as artist and writer, intellectual and theorist.
The 90 headwords presented by 31 entries (including Baj) of this intimate and personal dictionary present the names of the artists whose experience was interwoven with his, from Marcel Duchamp to Lucio Fontana, along with those of his companions in art (and artistic currents), such as Joe Colombo and Asger Jorn, as well as his writer friends, including Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, who translated his fantastic visions into narratives. The result is the map of an encyclopaedic building, where all the faces of an age and its prerogatives entwine: the dreams of the space age and the fears of the nuclear horizon, the surrealist imagery and the grotesque deviations of B-movies, the fascinations of technology and the first appreciable stirrings of an ecological conscience. A significant insight is devoted to the formal and symbolic interpretation of the masterpiece The Funeral of the Anarchist Pinelli, juxtaposed with an analysis of its relations with the teachings of Picasso and the legacy of Guernica.
Texts by Guido Almansi, Enrico Baj, Guido Ballo, Pietro Bellasi, Francesca Bergadano, Luca Bochicchio, Paolo Campiglio, Luciano Caprile, Stella Cattaneo, Roberta Cerini Baj, Martina Corgnati, Pierre De Mandiargues, Duccio Dogheria, Gillo Dorfles, Paola Gargiulo, Chiara Gatti, Alain Jouffroy, Giorgio Kaisserlian, Antonello Negri, Daniele Panucci, Octavio Paz, Tommaso Pomilio, Chiara Portesine, Raymond Queneau, Roberto Sanesi, Federico Sanguineti, Edoardo Sanguineti, Angela Sanna, Massimo Schuster, Michele Tavola, Arianna Vallarino.
€ 35,00