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BIOGRAPHY
of the
tapestry maker
:
UGO SCASSA was born in Portacomaro d'Asti on the 28th of December 1928 and he lives in Asti since 1934.
All
started with his
love of the figurative arts and the desire to transform this passion into
a direct and personal involvement.
He originally
had the idea of combining avant-garde art and one of the most ancient of all the
decorative arts.
After
more
than forty years
we
can now say that
he have had a
great
success and enormous satisfaction documented
from
relationships with such artists as
Corrado Cagli
and
Felice Casorati, Giorgio de Chirico
and
Renato
Guttuso, Umberto Mastroianni
and
Mirko Basaldella, Luigi Spazzapan
and
Emilio Vedova, but
also with an architect, Renzo Piano, whose drawings have been translated into
"high lisse".
And there are also the works that Scassa had made in homage to some of the
best-loved artists such as Paul Klee, Vasilij Kandinskij, Joan Miró, Henri
Matisse
and Max Ernst.
and the Tapestry Weaving Mill :
The "Scassa"
Tapestry
Weaving Mill
started its activity in Asti in 1957 and won in 1960 the
international contest for the famous liner
LEONARDO DA VINCI
1st Class saloon decoration.
All
of the cartoons for its sixteen tapestries on purpose: six by Corrado Cagli
and the others by Capogrossi, Turcato, Corpora, Santomaso and Bernini.
This remarkable success was the beginning of a long and successful cooperation
with master Cagli, till his death (1976). New successes were met, as the
new woven tapestries adorning two others famous Italian liners:
"MICHELANGELO" and "RAFFAELLO"."MICHELANGELO"
had provided for the inclusion of
six
tapestries,
one by
Capogrossi
and five
"Verdure" from a
drawing by the studio of the architect Nino Zoncada. Six tapestries, two of
them very large, by the architect and painter Roberto Aloi, were placed in the
cabin class, between the Salone delle Feste and the Lounge-Bar.
For
the "RAFFAELLO",
the architects,
Attilio and
Emilio La Padula
opted to choose
a still greater number of exponents of Italian abstract art.
A large series (22)
of tapestries was placed in the
"Atlantico
Grand
Bar".
They consisted of
abstract panels all
of the same
size, and
each
one made by
a
different artist.
Lastly, the
group of abstract tapestries hung in the first-class areas included two works by
Emilio
Vedova located in the
verandah bar
"Bermuda".
In 1963
Scassa participated at the INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY TAPESTRY EXHIBITION
(Ch âteau de Culan, France), as an Italian weaver in competition with French,
Belgian and other countries makers, with only three pieces of "haute-lisse"
tapestry on Cagli's and Mirko's cartoons.
In a special reportage from Paris, the New York Herald Tribune of
July 26th judged its three pieces the best tapestries in the Exhibition
(Italy
Outstanding
-Eight
countries are represented.
Italy has but three tapestries in the show, but in a country‑by-country
evaluation, they are the best), the
only ones able to compete with Matisse's and Lurçat's.
Its tapestries, were also to be found in others international exhibitions: at
the III BIENNIAL EXHIBITION in PARIS, an arras on Muzzi's pattern
"GEMINI" drew the
attention of Mr. Malraux, at that time the French Minister for the Cultural
Affairs, and this masterpiece was later purchased by its Ministry for the
"Collections de l'Etat Français"
Few years
later tapestries made in Asti atelier were exhibited
at the HERBSTSALON in MUNICH, woven on Cagli's, Mirko's
and Guttuso's patterns and others in ATHENS, GOTEBORG, NEW YORK.
In the U.S. Scassa's tapestries were shown in the moving
exhibition organized by the NEW YORK MUSEUM OF MODERN ART and during the
exhibition "The Italian ART OF LIVING" held in 1992 in New
York's Park Avenue.
Orders coming from many public and private companies engaged
Scassa's workshop to larger fulfillments: the tapestries
inspired by Max Ernst's work, "EUROPE AFTER THE RAIN", is 5 meters
llong and 2 meters
widee (shown at Turin's Civic Gallery of
Modern Art, in 1967 Exhibition).
The
size of the tapestry "APOLLO AND DAFNE" on Cagli's pattern is 5.30 meters length and 2.9
meters width;
Scassa's
masterpieces enrich now public Galleries and Buildings:
from Paul Klee's cartoons; from
Cagli's cartoons "THE RISEN CHRIST"
and "SAINT GEORGE" have
been purchased by the VATICAN for the "Galleria Paolina d'Arte
Moderna";
"NARCISO"
decorates the Presidential Room of the Italian Senate-house;
Five tapestries (four
from cartoons by Cagli: “Fishermen’s Women”, “Sails”, “Fishermen” and
“Journeys”, and one from a cartoon by Vedova:“Abstract"), respectively coming
from the collections of the liners “Leonardo da Vinci” and “Raffaello, decorate
the Library Conference Hall of the Senate of the Italian Republic at Palazzo
della Minerva in Rome.
"THE
FEBO'S ENIGMA" adorns the hall of RAI - Italian
Television and Radio broadcasting - in Turin.
Among the
226 tapestries produced by "Scassa" workshop we have to remember: Mastroianni's
"EURINOME" for the Court of Appeal
in Rome
and Paolo Conte's "ABSTRACT COMPOSITION" for the
Justice Court in
Asti;
Mirko's "THE
EMIGRANTS" for the Wenner-Gren
Anthropological Research Foundation, New York;
Avenali's
for the roman offices of the bank "BANCO DI SANTO SPIRITO";
Two
Spazzapan's and one Casorati's patterns decoratee the Congress Hall
"SALONE DEI TRECENTO" of the "ISTITUTO BANCARIO S. PAOLO DI TORINO".
A set of
four tapestries (from Cagli's, Guttuso's, Mirko's and
Sironi's patterns), and another of two (from Muzzi's), woven for the
O.N.P.I. Reception Rooms, are currently owned by
Commune of Meldola (Forlì) the former,
by Turin's Commune the latter.
A tapestry
from Spazzapan's cartoon adorns the Asti Chamber of Commerce, Industry
and Agriculture,
another,
from Casorati's (“SHOOTING
GALLERY” h. cm.197, l. cm.189) the "SAVINGS
BANK of ASTI".
Gonfalons
of LOMBARDY and PIEDMONT Regions,
Province of ASTI,
TAORMINA,
ASTI
and
SERRA DE' CONTI towns have
been woven in "Scassa" Workshop.
As an operations centre
for the Restoration and Conservation of Tapestries, the Arazzeria SCASSA has
cleaned and restored numerous works coming from both public and private
collections, among which “The Banquet of Joseph and his Brothers” (from a
cartoon by Bronzino, woven in Florence by the Flemish tapestry-maker Nicola
Karcher in 1549, measuring cm 565 x 500), surely the most important as to the
effort needed and the celebrity of the work. The tapestry is part of the famous
“Stories of Joseph the Hebrew” cycle (Florence, 1545-1553), from the
“manifattura medicea” (Medici workshop) founded by Cosimo I de Medici, and it is
among the ten tapestries displayed since 1886 at the Palazzo del Quirinale in
Rome, in a room which derives its name from the tapestry cycle: the “Bronzino
Room.
The cleaning and
restoration of the tapestry were performed between 3/1/1973 and 29/7/1977 under
the direction of Professor Claudio Strinati, from the Superintendence for Art
Galleries and Works of Art of Rome and Lazio.
The names
of many other Italian and foreign artists, as Accardi, Clerici, Conte, de
Chirico, Dorazio, Ercolini, Giansone, Giordano, Gribaudo, Guenzi, Lazzari,
Montanarini, Novelli, Omiccioli, Pace, Parisi, Perilli, Piciotti, Picone,
Rotella, Sadun, Sanfilippo, Scordia, Spoltore, Tadini, Trotti, Vedova,
Virduzzo, Zancanaro, Dalì, Ernst, Kandinskij, Klee, Matisse Mirò,
Rousseau and the Architect Renzo Piano, authors of
patterns and cartoons, clearly witness what kind of aesthetical requirements
engaged the technical abilities of the atelier in the last forty years.
From
some of the tapestries manufactured in Asti, about thirty,
are permanently exhibited in the "Gallery of
the Tapestries",
situated on different adjacent
and communicating rooms with the weaving workshop.
From the beginning of 2002, the
Ugo Scassa' "Gallery
of the Tapestries" has been transformed in the
"Tapestries Scassa'
Museum".
The visit to the Museum, kindly enriched also of some granted works in loan from
collectors (the
Mirko's
archives
of Rome, the family Molinengo of Turin, Mrs. Susanna Villa of Asti and Mr. Francis Muzzi of
Rome), it allows to admire an unique collection, to international level.
The
visitors can see how the
"haute-lisse" , the primitive and most noble form
of tapestry weaving, is carried out.
It involves a long and difficult proceeding in order to interpret and
successfully merge, in a unique poetical expression, a millenary technique with
the modern art style innovation.
Tapestries, in the workshop in
Asti, are woven following the traditional
technique handed down by the great Masters of the past and the methods
used by the nuns in the Saxon convents during the Romanesque age,
or by Nicolas Bataille in Paris in the fourteenth century, or, later by
the great Manufacturers of Arras, Tournais, Bruxelles, or by the very
keen Masters of the sixteenth-century Italian works of art, or by the
Gobelins' "lissiers" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Visitors are surprised to notice how this technique,
intentionally kept unchanged for centuries, without modifying any part of the
relevant tools and instruments, is so brightening in meeting these new style
inventions such as the tapestries of
Cagli, Capogrossi, Casorati, de Chirico,
Ernst, Kandinsky, Klee, Mastroianni, Matisse, Mirko, Mirò, Piano, Sottsass,
Spazzapan, Tadini and Warhol
It is really able to witness an aesthetical sensitivity quite different from the
past.
The Province in Asti,
to assure that this
secular
technical of weaving, reinvented in the workshop of
Scassa,
can have continuity in the future,
to allow the transposition of the modern figurative art
in the ancient fabric of
"haute-lisse", has
created a school of professional formation for tapestries' weavers.
In which, new levers of young apprentices, with the teaching of the actual
weavers and the study of the
tapestry' art, they
will be able, inheriting and continuing in the future years that great tradition
that has origin from the Italian artists of
sixteenth century, to create
new occasions of job for them and of economic development for the territory.
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