Photography, form, drawing: Elisa Montessori in the 1970s

Abstract

Elisa Montessori (1931) is well known for her pictorial and graphic work. The daily exercise of drawing and painting distinguishes her work in a wide variety of achievements, from large surfaces to small notebooks. In the 1970s, however, photography assumed a prominent presence in several series of works: Sheets (1974), Tropisms (1977), Morphologies (1979). These works shared the use of the collage technique, the square module, the combined use of drawing and photographic prints, and the suppression of color in favor of black and white. On a fragile support (canvas or cardboard), the drawing exercise appears conducted in counterpoint to the photographic images. This visual investigation and the recourse to photography characterized Montessori’s work at the height of the feminist season: it is from the reflection matured on her own experience and in her frequentation of the Maddalena group that originates, on the one hand, the desire to experiment with a medium less in dialogue with the history of male art, and on the other, the new attention to the presence of the artist's body in the work. On the basis of a selected bibliography, I would like to reflect on the works of the 1970s, focusing on the specific role of the use of photography in those years, trying to answer the questions that the limited use in time and the type of works inevitably raise.