«[…] ma io lavorerò da morire io non voglio essere una donna…». The battles for the emancipation of Adriana Bisi Fabbri in the 1910s

Abstract

Adriana Bisi Fabbri (Ferrara, 1881 – Travedona Monate, 1918) risked being remembered by artistic historiography especially as a cousin of the painter Umberto Boccioni and the wife of the journalist and writer Giannetto Bisi. Only recently, also thanks to the study and organization of his archive deposited at the Museo del Novecento in Milan, her nonconformist and anti-academic figure has been rediscovered and enhanced. The contribution reconstructs her fulminant and frantic career, divided between painting, caricature and graphic activity, highlighting her contribution to feminist activism in Italy, at the beginning of the twentieth century. With the series of temperas of 1912 The occupations of women in the family, Bisi Fabbri starts an original ironic reflection on the social role of women and on female stereotypes (animal woman, intellectual woman, congresswoman, thug…). The wish for redemption erupts instead from the thick sequence of pictorial self-portraits, where the action of excavation and self-analysis returns rebellious and libertarian states of mind. The disguise with male clothes and the masculinized pseudonym "Adrì" are tools to manage the family, the professional activity and the drama of the pressing tuberculosis with greater detachment. Finally, it will be seen how emancipation and visibility also pass through the channels of the art system, from the International Women's Exhibition of Fine Arts in Turin, organized by the magazine "La donna", to the exhibitions in the Clubs of Florence, Rome and Milan of the Lyceum feminine association.

Keywords

• self-portrait
• caricature
• lyceum club
• pseudonym
• disguise