Art on Display 1949-69Art on Display 1949-69

Palazzi Bianco and Rosso, Genoa, 1949-62

Franca Helg (1920-1989) and Franco Albini (1905-1977) began working together in 1950, founding the Studio Albini-Helg in 1952 in Milan. Helg had worked with BBPR before starting to work with Albini, and together they worked first on museum and exhibition design, and then on some major architectural projects such as La Rinascente department store in Rome. They were both as much designers as architects, and perhaps indeed best known for their furniture. Their clients included design companies such as Cassina and Arteluce, as well as the Milan metro, while Helg made a series of basketware chairs for Bonacina which pushed traditional craft to new limits. She also had an important role as a teacher at home and abroad, in this promoting their shared interest in combining artisanal work with industrial production.

The first commission signed by both of them was the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa, a thoroughgoing restoration project of an old building re-opened as a museum. This project was swiftly followed by work on its sister museum Palazzo Rosso over the road. The projects were immediately noticed and well received, and the contemporary reception reminds us that their work, which might now seem relatively modest, had notably inventive aspects and an implicit (if not explicit) sense of the new spirit of museography. The components we reproduce in the exhibition might be seen to represent the two sides of their thinking: the contemplative and the engaged. In both there is a wish, as with Scarpa, to make the paintings more object-like, and also to bring them into the real world. Wherever appropriate (where there was no convincing case to the contrary) they removed the frames with which paintings had been fitted posthumously. Physically this made the paintings lighter, and it also returned them to their original status as paintings, rather than as items used to furnish rich apartments. In this sense they aligned the painting both with the atelier, but also with the museum, rather than the private collection.

Albini's Tripolina chairs were sited in twos and threes in the Palazzo Bianco. Their lightness and portability (their origin is in the English nineteenth-century army camp chair) suggests function rather than luxury. While the majority of the paintings is hung simply, without frames, in front of the walls, a sizeable number is mounted, individually on existing stone capitals and on new concrete bases. These objects are like people, and the paintings meet us one to one, at our eye level. They are not sacralised in the way that many of Scarpa's objects are, but rather share our space. In the Palazzo Rosso Albini and Helg went further; paintings placed on lever arms had handles which allowed the viewer to move them out from the wall. One might ask the point of this, but it was part of their interest to return to the painting the fact that it was, first and foremost, oil on canvas, mounted on a stretcher. To make paintings part of our world, while at the same time preserving their special status, was a difficult balance, but one which it might be argued was achieved by Albini and Helg in these two projects.

Text Penelope Curtis. First published in the catalogue accompanying the Art on Display exhibition.