Milton Gendel: Portraits

An important selection of portraits of friends, from the American (even if an adopted Roman today) photographer Milton Gendel's collection, has been displayed for the first time in Rome: "Milton Gendel": Portaits. This exhibition is organized together with another important event, a second exhibit called "Una vita surreale" (i.e. a surreal life), housed in the Museum Carlo Bilotti Aranciera in Villa Borghese. The two events (which present the first retrospective exhibition of this artist) are organized by Peter Benson Miller, Barbara Drudi and Alberta Campitelli, and are included into the international Photo Festival of Rome.

Among the artists and collectors present in the exhibition, you'll find the architect Philip Johnson, and the artists Alighiero Boetti, Enzo Cucchi, Willem De Kooning and his wife Elaine, Piero Dorazio, Salvador Dalì, Fabio Mauri, Maurizio Mocchetti, the collectors Peggy Guggenheim, Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, John Paul Getty, the critics Harold Acton, André Chastel, John Pope Hennessy, Tom Hess, Mario Praz, Sacheverell Sitwell, the art dealer Leo Castelli, writers like Patrick Leigh Fermor, Georgina Masson, Iris Origo, Eugenio Scalfari, Evelyn Waugh and some aristocrats like Anna Laetitia Pecci Blunt, Lady Diana Cooper, Queen Elizabeth II, Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret.

The catalogue, in Italian and English, is edited by Peter Benson Miller and Barbara Drudi, graphics were realized by Buro Sieveking. The catalogue is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. The critical essays are written by Peter Benson Miller, Barbara Drudi, Alberta Campitelli, Lindsay Harris e Marella Caracciolo Chia, and they analyze the different aspects of Gendel's career, he actually was a sort of trait-d'union in the post-war world between American and Italian art; the essays describe the intellectual and artist with the sophisticated photographic sight and the witty, critical pen.