Bice Lazzari, Una Vita, Un Artista

While the Venetian-born, Roman artist Bice Lazzari is most known as a 20th-century modernist painter, she was an interdisciplinary artist who worked across various media: textiles and monumental murals, with which she collaborated with architects. Indeed, Lazzari initially trained as a musician, and it could be argued that music and her artistic experiments throughout her career informed her approach to art throughout her life. In addition, her personal and professional choices—forced to take up decorative arts at the Accademia instead of fine arts because she was a woman, for example—also reflect her feminist ideals at a time when law and cultural norms dictated the limits of freedoms women had before the 1970s. 

Using pivotal artworks by Lazzari from the long 1960s, specifically the painting Senza Titolo, from 1959 on a polyester backing, and Measures and Signs. Curvatures created in 1967 in the Guggenheim collection, this paper will interweave the vital role of Lazzari’s textile creations and large-scale compositions, considering the impact these multidisciplinary investigations had on her art during this pivotal and experimental decade. 

Moreover, this paper questions how productive it is to understand Lazzari’s work or the 1960s only against well-known artistic movements, such as Art Informel or Mid-20th-century Abstraction and Minimalism, which were dominated by male artists, critics, and curators. Instead, I look to broaden my gaze to address the broader social and cultural shifts occurring in Italy during the long 1960s, such as inter-regional migration, the industrialization of the textile industry before and after World War II, and the emerging Feminist movement. What emerges is a fiercely independent artist who sought to express herself on her own terms and a picture of Italy during the 1960s as a country grappling with enormous social, cultural, and industrial shifts.  

This paper was delivered as part of an invited convening, “Fissare e Guardare: Arte Italiana nei Lunghi Anni Sessanta,” Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, Venice, September 18, 2025.