Album dell'Adriatico

Renato Birolli in the summer of 1950, stayed in le Marche area for several months, working on a wide range of paintings and designing a picture album dedicated to the themes of the marine environment and fishermen's lives. This paper examines the history of the album and chronological time, having as a background the complex debates around the XXV Biennale of Venezia and also the convergence with the work done in Paris, during the previous years, together with Estève, Gischia, Pignon and Dominguez. The designs of the album express the interplay between function and invention in the territory of a real confrontation with surrealism, cubism and abstractism after the immediate postwar period.