Il gioco dell’arte con mio padre, Alighiero

Alighiero Boetti is universally recognized as one of the absolute masters of 20th-century art. We know everything-or almost everything-about his work. But what was Alighiero like as a father? In this superb book, Agata, the artist’s second child, born in Turin in 1972 from his relationship with Annemarie Sauzeau, talks about Boetti’s private side and embarks on a new interpretation of his art: “My father’s work is a game, a multitude of games,
very different from the complex, intellectual analysis voiced by the critics.”
Thus we discover a playful dimension which pervades not only the work but the very life of Alighiero, offering us a completely new vision of the master, portraying him as someone who was completely different from the stereotype of the classic father figure.
“I don’t ever remember having seen my father go out to work. He didn’t shave and he never wore a tie. He never talked about his colleagues or how much he earned. Sometimes he just slept all day, sometimes he would disappear for days, weeks or even months on end¿” If his children wanted to spend time with him, they had to resign themselves to entering his world, his way of living, his favorite playground: his head, his brain and preferably in his study, which didn’t look anything like a work place. It was a huge place, often empty, with a ping-pong table which he used for propping up his pots of paint, water colors, brushes, glue and sprays of various colors but also many other objects that had nothing to do with his painting: a fork, newspaper cuttings, a mouth-organ, a dinky toy, some buttons, a cork ¿”
Written for her children, so that they could begin to know their grandfather from a different angle from the exhibitions, catalogues and archives about his work, the book comes with a rich content of illustrations, almost all of which are published here for the first time, the personal property of Agata Boetti.