Alitalia’s Collection Takes Off From Finarte

Balla, Severini, Burri, Accardi, Vedova, Prampolini. These are the names of some of the artists signing the modern and contemporary art collection of Alitalia, which has decided to sell its works of art in the hope of reducing its exorbitant debts. A wealth that next 8th December will be auctioned at the Roman venue of Finarte, as decided by the Extraordinary Commissioner Augusto Fantozzi, politician and university lecturer nominated last year by the Italian Government to deal with the failure of the airline. Finarte takes pride in having obtained the mandate instead of other auction houses, including the Milanese Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Almost two hundred works of art, worth at least one million euros, will be auctioned during the event.

Some Alitalia officers, who started flying in 1947, believe that the collection “saw the light” in the rich Fifties, when the airline bought works of modern art to decorate its meeting rooms and VIPs’ waiting rooms, and it displayed the creations inside the DC-8 airplanes, placing the works on specific supports. Many paintings, instead, were expressly commissioned by the airline as pieces of interior design for Alitalia’s international offices, like, Zeus partorito dal sole (Zeus born from the sun) by Gino Severini (who, in 2008, became the most highly quoted futurist artist on the market) in the Fifties for the Parisian premises of the company and flagship of the whole collection. Other works embellished Alitalia’s offices in Rome, Milan, Turin and New York.

Among the artists, whose works will soon be on sale, we find important names such as Salvador Dalì, Giorgio de Chirico, Giacomo Balla, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Renato Guttuso, Mario Sironi, Fortunato Depero, Ottone Rosai, Massimo Campigli, and then the sculptors Giacomo Manzù and Mario Ceroli. Among the works realised in the Sixties, by masters who were then pioneers, we point out the paintings by Carla Accardi, Antonio Sanfilippo, Franco Angeli, Tano Festa and Francesco Lo Savio and two small compositions on paper by Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana.

With the Alitalia crisis and other financial crashes at global level, it has become clear that this situation is not sparing anyone and has had a violent impact even on the art market. Many will have noticed that numerous banks and companies, which used to keep on their walls marvellous works of art, “lost” their treasures once they had been overwhelmed by the cracks. With the economic collapse many pieces have returned to the market turning passionate collectors into strongly motivated sellers.

Luckily, the winds of crisis of the global economy are slowly clearing away although the situation is not totally favourable for sales. In the meantime, those collectors who still have some liquidity, are focusing on pieces of great artistic quality as they anxiously wait for the auction to be held on 8th December at Finarte. In conclusion, if we may, we would like to make a consideration which seems fair to us: considering the great value of these works it would be important for the minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Sandro Bondi, to try and gather and protect this heritage, thus enriching the collections of Italian museums of modern and contemporary art.