Enrico Baj

Horatius Nelson, Duke of Brontë. Collage sea shells, medals, brocade, compasses.

circa 1965

Enrico Baj, born in Milan on October 31, 1924 and died in Vergiate on June 16, 2003, was an Italian painter, libertarian anarcho-pataphysician. In 1950, with the painter Sergio Dangelo, he founded the Nuclear Movement (or Movimento Arte Nucleare), considered the Italian equivalent of the CoBrA movement. In 1953, he approached the painter Asger Jorn with the aim of founding the International Movement for an imaginist Bauhaus and organized the International Ceramic Meetings of Albisola, in which the painters Matta and Roland Giguère took part. From 1955, he composed his paintings with the most heterogeneous elements such as pieces of glass, skeins of wool, mattress canvas, watch dials. That same year, with the writer Édouard Jaguer, he created the Italian magazine Il gesto. After meeting Mesens in London, Marcel Duchamp and Arturo Schwarz in New York, he met André Breton in Paris in 1962. From 1965, he began a series of collages representing ladies: Dame Ninette de Valois, 1974 and Generals in ceremonial costumes overloaded with decorations: Lieutenant John Talbot, First Earl of Shrewsbury.