La contesa su Picasso. Fernanda Wittgens e Palma Bucarelli

It is 1953. After a devastating war whose aftermath is still visible, for the first time two women – Fernanda Wittgens and Palma Bucarelli – are at the helm of Italy’s most important museums: the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. Their common goal is to bring beauty back into the conversation and draw people back to museums. Picasso is the right artist to do this, having become the symbol of 20th-century civil art and transfigured all its horror in Guernica. The dispute between Wittgens and Bucarelli, centred on Picasso but not limited to him, is intellectual, philosophical and artistic. Their ability to deal with power and free themselves from it at the right moment, when the looming threat of fascism confronts them with the ethical imperative to save lives and defend artistic heritage, makes them protagonists of a period marred by hostile political winds but charged with ideals. Wittgens and Bucarelli observe each other closely and articulate their worldview and relationship with enemies and allies in a great “silent harmony”. Rachele Ferrario’s story does not romanticise their lives because it is their lives that constantly push towards the novel: there is something essential in these pages, a tangible legacy in which one woman faced prison and the other risked it, accepting the danger of disappearing forever in order to defend an idea of progress.