Beast in the Mirror: The Life of Outsider Artist Antonio Ligabue

by Karin Kavelin Jones, Antonio Ligabue

This biography introduces the remarkable career of Antonio Ligabue (1899-1965) to the English-speaking world for the first time. A self-taught painter and sculptor, Ligabue lived most of his life in a hut beside the Po River, not emerging from obscurity until the 1950s when articles and reviews of his work began appearing in the Italian press. Known as the "Van Gogh of Italy," this enigmatic artist, who worked purely by passion and instinct, won prestigious awards and has had film documentaries and television shows devoted to him.
Ligabue was a true "outsider," not only in how we might categorize his art, but in the unfortunate facts of his life. All but ostracized by human society because of mental, physical, and emotional "deficiencies" brought on by childhood diseases, neglect and poverty, Ligabue lived isolated in his hut, where he sculpted his animals from the river clay. Later, given oils and canvas, he painted his fantastic, yet realistic, animals, insects, birds, castles, and landscapes, as well as his many haunted self-portraits.
In May 1996,a major celebration of Ligabue's life and art was held in his home town of Gualtieri, featuring an exhibition of his work, films and panel discussions.

136 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1997

Reviews

[Kathleen Fowler]

I was delighted to discover that someone had finally written a biography of naïve artist Antonio Ligabue (1899-1965) in English. Leafing through it, I was pleased to find it illustrated with an abundance of reproductions of Ligabue’s artwork, a few in full color, I only wish it hadn’t turned out to be one of those “biographies” that reads like a novel. You know, the kind where the author describes all kinds of stuff they couldn’t possibly know anything about, including undocumented conversations, thoughts and dreams. The opening paragraph of the very first chapter, concerning Ligabue’s birth, was a tip-off: “The agony of cat love cracks the night. Confused by the fake dawn of a full moon, fox and wild boar roam the woods for breakfast. Seabirds, aroused by the light, wake to go fishing. In the dark of the riverbed, the fish sleep on undisturbed.” Huh?!? Here’s another example from page 45: “Drugged with homesickness, he slept for twenty hours never waking until the sun fingered its way inside the shutters and over the bed. He had been dreaming of the Alps. Slippery with perspiration, he made useless adjustments to the bedsheets and tried to get back to sleep. By the time he woke again the sun had slipped entirely off the bed and he understood that the dear, safe days of Switzerland were gone forever.” This sort of “historical reconstruction” sets my teeth on edge.

Reading an alleged biography of this sort presents the reader with an enormous problem, namely, it’s very difficult to tell where the facts leave off and the author’s imagination begins. Well, no, not always very difficult—sometimes it’s terribly obvious as in the examples quoted above. But my point is, when I read a biography, I like to know that what is set forth is confined to verifiable facts, unless otherwise stated by the author. I have no objections to an author presenting theories and conjecture as long as it they are identified as such.

Forgive me, Ms. Jones, for being harsh in my judgement, but my disappointment is profound. You got my hopes up only to dash them. In all fairness, your editor and publisher are perhaps more to blame than you are, since they signed off on what you had written when they ought to have known better. I do give you credit for a genuine interest in Ligabue’s life and art and a sincere desire to introduce him to the English-speaking world; I just wish you had stuck with the facts and only the facts, ma’am. Either that, or you should have called what you wrote a novel based on the life of Antonio Ligabue, which is what this book actually is.

[Ben Yaxley]

I can sense the author had a lot of fun with this biography. As other reviewers have pointed out, the writer has taken a Lot of creative liberties, for example, one paragraph reads:

"The secretions of a spider, forced out in wet threads, parked on the window sill and hardened. Lying in bed next to the window, Ligabue watched, convinced of the triumph of small things. Her masterpiece completed, the spider made her way to the center of the web. Ligabue got up and put on his apron. Using the palette knife, he cut yellow oil into whipped peaks of white, then tinged it with black, more yellow. He picked up the color with a brush and willed the brush to be a spider forcing out secretions of wet thread to park on the canvas and grow hard in the air. He glanced over at the spider. She lay in her cradle dreaming away the day and night. With impastoed strokes, he fleshed out a round spider. Finished, he climbed back into bed to dream away the day and night."

I find it so funny that this is the only English biography on Ligabue, which the writer seeks to redress, but in the most brazen way. Their methodology is one based on imagination, speculation, and urban legend; their approach holding much more sympathy with the naifs, outsiders and crazymen than the by-the-book academics.

The last line has the writer attending an international seminar on the artist, but not quite getting to say what they wanted to say.
"I was thinking that I'd made a flop of it, and felt quite ashamed; maybe I could make up for it with this book."

Hell yeah.

[Jennifer]

This is really the only overview of Ligabue's life and works available in English at the time of writing, and I'm glad to have access to the information it offers, in one resource, as a person with limited ability to read Italian.

But it is unfortunately a poorly written work, lurching awkwardly between fact and imaginings, prose purple and livid. It is neither a biography or a story, but an unfortunate mishmash of both, leaving the reader wondering where Jones gets license to add unobservable descriptions, and what the historical record actually offers.
Unfortunately, even the reproductions of the paintings in colour provided in the book are printed badly, and the information is poorer in quality than can be grasped with Google Translate on a few of the many Italian websites dedicated to his works.

[Julie]

I might be a bit biased; Antonio Ligabue was adopted into our family tree, so, of course, I'm fascinated by his story, and now, his art. I enjoyed the book -- it led to deeper research into the family in Italy. It's a shame that I didn't know about him while he was living.