NOTE OF THE CURATOR

Writes the authoress in her foreword: Finally I could start again to paint nudes and portraits, refusing the cliché they wanted to impose on me.
It was Max Ernst who in those years encouraged her to add figurative elements to abstract compositions.
A. Cima got to know Max Ernst at the gallery “Jolas” in Milan.
But shortly there after, being aware that the market and the art galleries were playing a one way game, A. Cima stopped any exposition, dedicating only pencil-portraits to her closest friends.
Her portrait-drawings through the years include Marianne Moore and Eugenio Montale, Aldo Palazzeschi and Giuseppe Ungaretti and Rita Levi Montalcini, and younger friends like Vanni Scheiwiller, Marisa Bulgheroni, Vico Faggi.

Trasformation, 1969
65 x 44 cm
Oil on canvas

Still today A. Cima continues this exercise, in the hope that “aesthetics and the
arts could save the world, recuperating ethics and noble thinking which otherwise could sorrowfully cancel each other out”.
Montale writes, “you already have three talismans: / pen, music and colors.”.
In some of the many poems E. Montale dedicated to A. Cima in Diario postumo you can find verses regarding her poetry: “I tuoi cristalli trasparenti / non periranno nella funerea scia, / già travalicano le lugubri scacchiere / che decidon le sorti. / Nell’ora cara agli dei / tutto muterà d’un tratto, / era già scritto.”.
Annalisa Cima passed on to “logos”, the word which “could save ourselves”, in the utopic desire for a platonic republic, in a world where muses and the arts are triumphant.
Also where one can forget divisions and qualunquismo, living in the dream of the beautiful, like the gods on Olympus, in a “phalanstery” only for musicians, painters and poets where exclude personal interests and vile ambitions are excluded and the metaphysics of the word, the gesture, the voice with which to find the forgotten Eden, are privileged.

Vanni Scheiwiller

Traduzione di Friedrich G. Glombik