EXHIBITION

REDISCOVERING GIAN BERTO VANNI: THE EARLY YEARS - 1952–1960

This exhibition marks the first in a series dedicated to the rediscovery of the art of Gian Berto Vanni. It focuses on the works he created in his late twenties and early thirties, where a vision emerges through color fields ruptured by floating geometries and crystalline tensions. The period from 1952 to 1960 constitutes a defining chapter, in which his visual language began to assert itself with clarity and independence, in conscious distance from the dominant movements of his time.

The show opens with two paintings Vanni created during his studies under Josef Albers at Yale University in 1952–53, where he had been admitted on a Fulbright Scholarship. His application was supported by Vordemberge-Gildewart, his former teacher in Holland. It was a decisive experience that gave Vanni a structured language through Albers’s teachings on the relativity of color and the discipline of visual interaction. This foundation would become the backbone of his creativity.

Yet if Albers emphasized optical clarity and restraint, it was the conceptual and formal approach of Paul Klee, a friend and colleague of both Albers and Vordemberge-Gildewart, which offered Vanni a more generative model of artistic thinking. Klee’s theory of painting as a symbolic language capable of articulating perception, ambiguity, and metaphor resonated deeply with him. Like Klee, Vanni approached pictorial composition as a process: a kind of construction in which meaning emerges through relationships that are sometimes contrapuntal and sometimes lyrical. The connection between painting and music was especially meaningful; Klee drew directly on musical theory to articulate his ideas about abstract art, seeing rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint as shared structural principles.

This sensitivity to musical structure was deepened through Vanni’s conversations with Arturo Toscanini in Riverdale, where the Maestro spoke to him at length about musical interpretation. Toscanini’s focus on structural coherence, rhythmic precision, and emotional tension left a lasting impression. Listening to him, Vanni began to reflect on how a musical phrase could shift in meaning depending on tempo or emphasis, and how color and form might function in a similar way. This insight helped him define a visual grammar of his own, one in which structure and expression were never separate but constantly intertwined.

Resettling in Paris in the fall of 1953, Vanni entered a landscape shaped by divergent aesthetic ideologies. Art Informel had gained visibility following the exhibition Un Art autre, while Galerie Denise René provided a stronghold for geometric abstraction and kinetic research. Vanni observed these movements attentively but remained apart. His refusal to align with any single current was not indifference but conviction. His inner compass, shaped by the rigor of Albers’s pedagogy, was ultimately guided by the direction offered by Klee. In this sense, Vanni represents a postwar continuation of Klee’s vision: a belief in painting as an autonomous, symbolic language capable of reconciling structure and freedom, clarity and ambiguity.

His paintings from this period are never doctrinaire. They are composed but not rigid. Whether using fields of color in dialogue with crystalline forms, floating structures, or diagrammatic vectors, Vanni constructed space not through illusionistic depth but through relationships of tension, equivalence, and quiet conflict. Each composition is a closed system, where ambiguity is not a byproduct but a guiding principle. Although abstract and geometric, these works stand apart both from the artists exhibiting at Denise René and from the American Color Field painters. While he shared the belief of the latter that color could be a subject in itself, he rejected the idea that immersion alone was the goal.

Vanni’s color fields are not enveloping voids. They are spaces of tension, resistance, and articulation. They exist in dialogue with precise, sometimes jewel-like elements that interrupt or punctuate their spread. In place of surrendering to atmosphere, he insisted on the presence of structure: sometimes quiet, sometimes graphic, always deliberate. Forms hover, accumulate, and dissolve. Color is precise, often restrained, yet rarely static. Chromatic relationships unfold slowly, like themes in a sonata.

This exhibition invites a closer look at an artist who, from the outset, pursued an independent and rigorous path, already complete in his vision. As Italian art historian and critic Enrico Crispolti, a leading voice on postwar Italian art, once said: “Vanni is an artist who does his own thing from the imaginative point of view… who should be rediscovered.”

Gian Berto Vanni (Rome, 1927 – Kythira, 2017) was an Italian painter whose layered, exploratory style bridges modern and contemporary art. His formation began with Italian Futurist Alberto Bragaglia, continued with Neo-Plasticist Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart in Amsterdam, and culminated at Yale under Josef Albers. Alongside these formative encounters, the legacy of Paul Klee became a central touchstone; Vanni would become one of the few postwar artists to meaningfully carry Klee’s vision forward, treating painting as a language of structure, ambiguity, and transformation.

This synthesis shaped a singular visual grammar: miniature-like precision meets raw textures, figurative fragments hover among geometric tensions, and chromatic relationships unfold like musical themes. Vanni’s career spanned Rome, Paris, and New York, where he taught at Cooper Union for over three decades. His work probes memory, abstraction, and contradiction, forging an independent path rooted in the modernist avant-garde yet responsive to the evolving questions of contemporary painting.