Artwork of the Month - January 2024

The winter of 1963 is remembered as one of the coldest of the 20th century, with an icy end of January in many cities on the Italian peninsula: It is difficult to identify the snow-covered landscape portrayed by Mimì Quilici Buzzacchi in The White Winter of 1963, considering that the artist, after moving to Rome in 1945, a new 'emotional space' after the tragedy of the war and the death of her husband, alternated views of the Eternal City (and in particular of the Lungotevere and Monte Mario) with depictions of the valleys of Lombardy, Ferrara and the Po delta, places to which she had been attached since childhood.

Coming from the artist's private collection, this winter landscape with hills and trees significantly represents the mature season of Quilici Buzzacchi, who, after a figurative phase of gauche descriptiveness, from the mid-1950s turned increasingly towards abstract and synthetic forms, reminiscent of Cézanne and Morandi.

The narrative and poetic sensibility of the artist - fervently self-taught, if we exclude the lessons with the Piedmontese painter Edgardo Rossaro - is widely declined in landscapes and urban views, and also in a vast and valuable xylographic production, always in search of a 'modern' interpretation of the humanistic rule.

In 1963, the work was exhibited at the IV Rassegna delle Arti Figurative di Roma e del Lazio held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, then at the Galleria Anthea in Rome; purchased the following year, it became part of the Capitoline collections.

Return to the section > The Galleria d'Arte Moderna artwork of the month