The I.C.B.I.E. Blog

Pietro arrived at JFK at dawn on Tuesday, July 1st. On Wednesday afternoon, he met Toby and me in the lobby at MOMA to view the beautiful work of D’Artagnan in the group show called “Glossolalia.” On entering the third-floor gallery, Pietro had the face of a delighted child. He was so moved at the triumph of his friend. Ele D’Artagnan is identified on the wall label as Michele Lombardi-Toscanini. Eviva!!! If ever an occasion called for prosecco, this was it! So we indulged.

Today is the last day of the exhibit at MOMA, and Kate, Toby’s sister, arrives in New York from Chicago, just in time. It was Kate who first encouraged Pietro to bring D’Artagnan to New York and find a gallery. So it is her triumph, too. Pietro is now working toward a show in Venice in 2011 to mark D’Artagnan’s hundredth birthday, in the city of his birth.

It’s that time of year; schools are out in the northern hemisphere, and it seems like everyone is flying all over the world, despite the economic pinch and stratospheric fuel costs.  Just to keep track of everyone is quite a task!

ICBIE President Pietro Gallina, after his brief stay in Salvador in the wake of his long European tour, is flying to New York today, for a two week stay.  Right off the bat, he will certainly go to the Museum of Modern Art to see the D’Artagnan painting hanging on its walls; he will also be seeing Kerry at KS Art in Tribeca, to collect some hefty sums from the sale of the maestro’s works; and he will be able to reconnect with Toby and Mary, our faithful supporters in the Big Apple.

Marlene returned to Salvador last night, after her well-deserved month long vacation in Rome, Paris and Barcelona.  She will immediately take up the reins while Pietro is away, and all her Italian students will undoubtedly be happy to get back to their lessons.

A wonderful new ICBIE volunteer, Louise Audette, arrived last week, and today she will begin her English courses.  Louise is a teacher at the American Overseas School of Rome, which has already provided us with three other teachers, Rosa de Bellis, Michelle Falcinelli and Daniele Dattilo, as part of its Bridge to Bahia project.  Louise’s enthusiasm and charming smiles will certainly inspire our students and help them to build useful language skills, and we thank her in advance for her expertise.

ICBIE artist Julio Costa is still in Spain, staying with Celeste and Veronique.  They all spent the weekend on the Costa Brava, enjoying the hospitality of our volunteer Lorena, who allowed them to use her family’s beach house.  After months of rain and cool temperatures, warm sunshine allowed him to fully enjoy the pleasures of Catalunya. Julio has another couple weeks to enjoy his European adventures, before flying back to Ribeira.

Our faithful Bogus (who can rightly claim to be our finest Italian student) is also preparing to embark on his second trip to Italy.  With the precious help of Sandro, a retired Alitalia pilot, he was able to get a big discount on his plane ticket, which will take him to Rome on July 17th.  He will stay with Sandro and his wife Yvonne, and will try to enroll in a technical school, to keep him busy during an extended stay.  Although we will miss his smiles and his many services around the ICBIE, we wish him a lot of luck for his new adventures.

When the news of D’Artagnan’s work at the Museum of Modern Art broke yesterday, it unleashed an real tsunami of enthusiasm across the whole ICBIE community, with a flurry of triumphant and congratulatory emails flying around the globe. In New York, our stalwart friend Mary Norris went straight from work to the museum, to verify the news. Here is her report!

YES! D’Artagnan is there! It is a deep, lush, purple painting, full of his signature trees and veins and leaves and flames and beads and seeds, with a gingerbread house and triplets. And toes, of course. It hangs low, which suits it, because of the toes and because one of the flower shapes in the background (though there is no background, really–that’s one of the things about him) looks like sea anemone, waving. You have to crouch to get a good look at it, and people do. It’s in very good company. On the way in, I saw Saul Steinberg. To D’Artagnan’s left is a Joseph Cornell. There’s a John Currin (hot) and a Basquiat and a Miro and an R. Crumb. I just can’t stop smiling at the thought of D’Artagnan safe in that company.

Thanks for the news, Mary!

A wonderful surprise, ever so often. That’s really what keeps us going, and luckily, the mad ICBIE dream has been sustained by fortuitous luck, which always seems to arrive in the proper, albeit often crucial, moment.

Today’s thunderbolt came from our dear friend Kerry, whose KS Art gallery has managed D’Artagnan’s paintings since 2003.  A D’Artagnan work is now hanging in public display at the Museum of Modern Art!  A new exhibition, ‘Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing,’ organized by Connie Butler (Chief Curator of Drawings for the Robert Lehman Foundation), has opened in the galleries of the museum’s drawing department, and it includes D’Artagnan’s TETRADACTILUS, one of the four works that the MOMA purchased in 2003.

Here is the link to the MOMA website: http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=7823

Ele D’Artagnan inspired the whole ICBIE dream, and his deliriously beautiful art continues to provide us with a banquet of hope.

One of the clearest indications of an excruciatingly boring flight is when you are so desperate that you read the in-flight magazine, where all the stories of exotic travel and adventures only make your trip to the Midwest seem more mundane. For that very reason, you can’t help envying the travelers whose fate landed them on an Alitalia plane, because that beleaguered carrier has brilliantly compensated for its chronic flight delays, lost luggage, and poor service by including a brilliant full-page article about the ICBIE in its on board magazine!

Written by Piero Faltoni, the story is entitled, “To Salvador de Bahia, Solidarity and a Vacation,” and it recounts the whole ICBIE story, from D’Artagnan’s paintings to the founding of the Institute, the academic program, the Da Vinci Library, and the collaborations in the neighborhood, including the Minha vò Flor orphanage. It closes with a paragraph dedicated to the dream of restoring the old hydroplane base at the tip of the Ribeira peninsula, where Italo Balbo completed his historic 1930 transatlantic flight, and transforming the site into a museum.

Alitalia, as a company, is in terrible shape (and how could it be otherwise, when its name is an acronym for “Always Late In Take-off, Always Late In Arrival”), but we have to thank them for a sweet article!

The previous post bragged about exciting contacts with important people, and among them, the mayor of Salvador João Henrique, who has received us several times in his office at City Hall.  Little did I know that, more or less at the same time that I was writing the article, the mayor and several city councilmen were making an official visit to the ICBIE!

As soon as Pietro found out about this, he quickly organized a meeting with all the city’s street artists who participate in the Salvador Graffita project, to make the event into a big end-of-year cultural summit, with more than forty people attending, including two famous local artists, Leonel Mattos and Paranaguà.  Speaking to the assembled group, the mayor offered his formal thanks for ICBIE’s support of Salvador Graffita, and especially, for our help in organizing the tour to Italy of Julio and Bigode.  He also expressed his gratitude to the ICBIE’s Italian team, for their wonderful help and, in particular, for organizing the visit of the two city councilmen, including our friend Tucanaré, who was present at the meeting.

After the art caucus, Mr. Henrique remained, as he wanted to meet all the people on our team.  He chatted candidly with Marlene, with Lu, with our sweet and ever-present student Mito, and with all of Julio’s young ICBIE artists.   Then Pietro took him on a leisurely tour of the grounds, lingering in our empty theater space, where he told the mayor about our progress in the plans to build a proper building, including the exciting prospects with the Engineers Without Borders, whose central office has approved our project.  In the course of the conversation, the mayor inquired about how much assistance we receive from the Italian government, and was flabbergasted to learn that the ICBIE has received no institutional support whatsoever.   He asked how we were able to achieve such an effective and dynamic institute, all on our own, and Pietro then told him the whole story, of D’Artagnan and his paintings, of our personal sacrifices, putting our life savings into the building of the ICBIE dream, and of the donations of groups of friends and of schools in Italy, all done in the name of social solidarity, to help the young people of the Cidade baixa.

The mayor, overwhelmed with emotion, was moved nearly to tears, and he left the ICBIE, rubbing his eyes.

In closing, as a New Year’s greeting, here’s a photo taken in a New York City bar, sent to me by our nostalgic and ever-faithful supporter, Mary Norris!   Saúde!!!

Roy Zimmerman

The D’Artagnan festival in Amsterdam has finished and, thanks to Pietro and Mary Norris, news is trickling through. Sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute, the festival covered a seven day period, with contrasting events held in different places around the city, to illustrate the multi-faceted talents of D’Artagnan. His youthful passion for music was honored with an opening concert on June 4th at the Keizersgracht church, where the Ensemble Duomo played Fellini film music by Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone. June 6th brought a street party at the Paramariboplein, with Fellinian costumes, Venetian masks and a circus show by Triomfo Infanti. Mary arrived from New York in time for that event, and described it as “a Dolce Vita party, with people dressed as Fellini and Giulietta Massina and clownish puttane (Gradisca?) . . . There was a runway, and a lot of strutting in dark glasses.” A troupe from Italian RAI TV was there, collecting material for a future D’Artagnan documentary. Mary raved about the six musicians of the Fietsarmonik Orkestra (a cymballist, tuba, accordion, two saxes, and a cornet), that arrived–lined up on a bicycle. “They rode around the park a few times and then came in and played. It got better later, when the cook (they made pasta for fifty) started strumming a guitar and singing, and the old accordionist tried to jam with him, and finally all the other band members went and got their instruments and just played all night and everybody danced in the square. Roberto Rizzo, the wonderful photographer that went with Ella to Ribeira, was there, dancing around with his camera.” Mary sent the photos below, but there are hundreds more at
www.buurt-online.nl/amsterdam/baarsjes/.

June 7th was the busiest day, with a 5 PM vernissage of the exhibition of D’Artagnan mask-portraits (which continues until June 30th) at the D&T Fenice Hotel on the Prinsengracht, and a cocktail at its wonderful old bar. Mary enjoyed both the art and the venue: “I’d never thought of them as a separate genre–in fact, I thought of it as a portrait gallery when I came in. It’s a sweet show, and the bar is very low and dark, with a door onto a road along a canal, with some trees. It stays light out here till almost eleven at night. There was free-flowing prosecco, just the way I like it.” (Mary has posted some pictures of the show on her blog: http://alternatesideparking.blogspot.com/.) But there was no time to linger. At 8:30 PM came an exclusive, invitations-only evening at the Italian Cultural Institute, where amidst an assortment of D’Artagnan memorabilia and photos, our own Professor Pietro Gallina gave a lecture that centered upon his new biography, while Mary Norris and Ella Arps added their appreciation of the master’s genius. A fine new film, “Sognando Fellini,” by Alberto Felicetti was shown, where D’Artagnan drawings are superimposed over snippets from three Fellini movies made at the time as the sketches. The evening was again filmed by the Italian documentary team, led by Pietro’s talented former student, Monica.

The D’Artagnan celebrations finished on Sunday, June 10th, with a 3:30 PM showing of Fellini’s Amarcord and Toby Damitt at the Filmmuseum in the Vondelpark. Pietro, rather than returning straight to Rome, suddenly veered off to Brussels, where he is making new artistic contacts for the ICBIE.

A large part of the ICBIE’s financial support has come from the paintings of Ele D’Artagnan, the eccentric artist who befriended Pietro from earliest childhood. Pietro inherited all his works when the maestro died in 1987, and since then, he has worked to establish a posthumous reputation for him, as a precious testimonial of the Dolce Vita days of Cinecittà . The success of Pietro’s campaign culminated in the famous New York showing in 2003, when the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) grabbed a handful of the best paintings, causing their market value to skyrocket (and our ICBIE dreams to materialize).

In a few days, the most important showing of D’Artagnan art works ever held in Europe will take place in Amsterdam, thanks to the efforts of a wonderful lady named Ella Arps, who Pietro met in Salvador, where she was seeking to help the Alagados, the awful favelas built on stilts over the bay, about a mile away from the ICBIE. Their encounter began ICBIE’s rapport with the venerable capoeira master, Mestre Pedro, and led to Ella’s passion for D’Artagnan.

The Amsterdam show will be a week long festival held in various venues, under the august auspices of the Italian Cultural Institute, where, on June 7, Pietro Gallina will give a lecture, presenting his biography Ai margini della dolce vita: Il pittore/attore Ele D’Artagnan. The evening will also include the projection of D’Artagnan filmclips and a live concert dedicated to Nino Rota, Fellini’s musical alter-ego. On June 10, the Film Museum of the Vondelpark will show more D’Artagnan filmclips, together with integral projections of both Amarcord and the amazing short film Toby Dammit.

The Arps Gallery website has all the information about the exhibit in English. Just go to www.arpsgallery.com, and remember to tell your art-loving friends.

Complete information (in Italian) from the Italian Institute of Culture can be found here.

By the way, Pietro’s biography is also, rightly, the first book to be published by the newborn ICBIE Editore. (Beware of ICBIE’s omnipresent conglomerate tentacles!)