Bobi Bazlen
Drawings of Analysis

30.11.2023__28.01.2024

Sala fontana
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curated by Acquario Editore
 
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Produced and organised by the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo in conjunction with Acquario Editore

Bobi Bazlen Drawings of Analysis30 November 2023__28 January 2024
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Roberto Bazlen, I disegni dell’analisi con Ernst Bernhard, 1944-1950 © Fondo Bazlen di Luciano Foà, per gentile concessione di Acquario Editore

These 100 drawings, chosen from among the many that Bazlen drew between 1944 and 1950, form a visual diary of his psychoanalysis with Ernst Bernhard based on the practice of active imagination, using a different technique from usual to express the images of dreams and fantasies as a key to interpreting the subconscious: Bernhard asked Bazlen, a man of letters, to draw. Bazlen gradually refined his technique, starting with pencil and India ink before moving on to watercolour and, ultimately, to mandalas. But then Bazlen’s symbols, figures and dreamlike scenarios inevitably hark back to symbols, figures and scenarios adopted by man from the outset: the traveller, the Oriental, the couple, the Devil, the island, play, the port, the journey, death, religious symbology and the “quaternity”. Almost all the drawings bear the date of the dream and the moment he set it down on paper on the back.

Roberto Bazlen.
The world of publishing’s most prodigious and hidden talent scout

Born in Trieste in 1902, Bazlen died in in Milan in 1965. Holding Italian and German nationality, his gaze was trained on Mittel-European culture, which was still virtually unknown in Italy. A tireless reader, he found on the bookstalls in the ghetto the books that the Austrians had left behind when leaving Trieste. As a young lad he rubbed shoulders with Saba, Quarantotti Gambini, Edoardo Weiss and above all with Svevo, whom he himself mentioned to Montale, thus launching his career. In 1934 he moved to Milan, where in 1937 he met Luciano Foà with whom he began to work in 1942 for Adriano Olivetti’s Nuove Edizioni Ivrea, a project that was to inspire the founding of Adelphi several decades later. He met Montale in Genoa in 1924 and introduced him to Kafka and Mittel-European literature, eventually becoming his hidden counsellor. In 1939 he moved to Via Margutta in Rome, where two sisters rented him the room that was to be his true home for the rest of his life. He forged contrasting bonds, frequenting worlds very different from one another: artists, women translators to whom he taught the job, the psychoanalyst Ernst Bernhard and the worlds of Jungian Analysis and astrology. He worked as a hidden consultant for many publishing houses including Carocci, Rosa e Ballo, Cederna, Frassinelli, Astrolabio, Bocca, Guanda, Bompiani, Einaudi and Boringhieri, always seeking to maintain an even keel with regard to the city’s intellectual salons. His editorial suggestions mostly caught publishers off their guard and fell on deaf ears, exceptions to that rule including Jung’s work which he had Astrolabio publish and Musil’s L’uomo senza qualità which was taken up by Einaudi. He founded Adelphi with Luciano Foà and Roberto Olivetti in 1962, finally being able to pour into it the stream of ideas and authors that he had not yet succeeded in placing. He also planned the Biblioteca Adelphi and was the driving force behind its catalogue for many years. Evicted from his Rome “lair” in 1965, he went through a few tough months before dying suddenly in a Milan hotel on 27 July 1965.