«I was raised free». Maria Padula: story of a Lucanian artist

Abstract

Maria Padula (Montemurro, PZ 1915 - Naples 1987) was a painter and writer. Daughter of a peasant woman and a man who did not want to recognize her, she was adopted by a family from her country who encouraged her artistic trends by supporting her in her studies at the Academies of Fine Arts in Naples and Florence. The first Lucanian woman to attend an Academy, she developed a strong and autonomous personality, original with respect to the traditional canons of femininity in force in rural southern Italy. During the Second World War she married the artist Giuseppe Antonello Leone. In the mid-forties she began her exhibition career as a naturalistic and subtly metaphysical painter in various Italian cities. She attended intellectuals and artists, including Rocco Scotellaro, Carlo Levi, Manlio Rossi Doria, Leonardo Sinisgalli. In the 1950s she began her writing activity. The autobiographical novel The wind carried the voices. The story of a Lucanian girl, tells about her difficult youthful experience as an off-site student, forced to face many male-dominated prejudices. He published critical, literary and socio-political writings. Teacher at the art institutes of Potenza and Naples, she reconciled the practice of painting and writing and the duties of teacher and mother of five children with the social commitment aimed at defending women's rights, militating in the context of the parliamentary left and of catholic groups. In 1976 she was one of the founders of the Nuova Identità feminist movement, whose activity was documented in the Naples 1980s exhibition, organized in Naples in 1980.