Emilio Vedova
Tumulto, 1960

The fight for me is physiological. It is a way of reference, all understanding. Clashes – to better feel how much life, how much death. It is precisely for the opposites, in constant comparison, that I am most able to center my work of expression.

Tumulto belongs to a series of large canvases painted by Emilio Vedova in 1960, in which the strength of the gesture and the intensity of the colors are the distinctive features of a painting that is the object of international criticism. Stylistically it recalls the works presented in the personal room at the XXX Venice Biennale of the same year.

Tumulto, 1960
waterpaint, pastels and sand on canvas
145,2 x 194,4 cm

In a "clash of situations"... I will start with this topic, which for me, before being considered an artistic political fact, is simply a human fact. Of men about whom certain liberties and certain non-liberties, certain closures and certain thaws, always touch consequential extremes. Of the so-called "de-Stalinization in art" - which began in Poland in 1956 - from time to time there are symptoms also in other Eastern countries. Not yet in Russia, as far as we saw at the Biennials.

1960 is the year of the XXX Venice Biennale in which the artist wins the Grand Prize for Italian painting, unanimously awarded by an international commission chaired by Herbert Read and made up of seven internationally renowned scholars, including Werner Hartmann and Jean Leimarie.
Barbara Butler's long review of the "New York Herald Tribune" of July 10, 1960 offers an American-centric tenor reading that places Vedova alongside a great protagonist of the American avant-garde, Franz Kline.
In the photos above, are visible some large canvases assembled for the occasion.

Vedova with Philip Guston, Caffè Florian Venice, 1960 in the days of the inauguration of the XXX Art Biennale.

The opening days at the Giardini offer Vedova the opportunity to see friends, artists and critics again. Philip Guston and Dore Ashton are among the New York acquaintances that he has the opportunity to find in Venice these days. In the United States pavilion, abstract expressionism is celebrated through four of its exponents. Guston, introduced in the catalog by Dore Ashton, Hans Hoffmann, Franz Kline and Theodore Roszak. Guston features thirteen paintings largely from public institutions such as MoMA and Whitney in New York, the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, as well as galleries such as Sidney Janis or private collections such as Ileana Castelli's.

On the occasion of the Biennale, Michel Tapiè's book Morphologie autre is officially presented, which documents the protagonists of the abstract, contemporary international avant-garde such as Fautrier and Saura, the Americans Sam Francis, Kline, Louise Nevelson and Rothko. By Vedova, in the volume, reproduces the large canvas Dal ciclo della protesta ’58 - n. 1 dated 1958, similar in compositional structure to Tumulto.