On the 1950s lyrical abstractions of a little-known protagonist of Italian art

A member of the Movimento Spaziale group founded by Lucio Fontana after World War II, Italian painter Edmondo Bacci (1913–78) began exhibiting internationally in 1956, and was one of the few artists on the Italian art scene to process the latest developments in abstraction.

This catalog looks at the more lyrical side of Bacci, when his career reached international success. In the early 1950s, Peggy Guggenheim and various art historians admired his art and celebrated the generative force of his color, his disruption of spatial planes and the circular rhythms of his brushwork. This book also explores the evolution of Bacci’s idiom of color and light by examining his seminal works of the 1950s, which were acquired by US collectors through the advocacy of both Guggenheim and Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Edmondo Bacci: Energy and Light presents an artist who has been unjustly neglected in the annals of English-language art history.