My memories of Aunt Mini are partly dictated by the stories my mother, Mia Mendini Morganti, told and partly by a couple of episodes I experienced personally as a child.

Marieda, Aunt Mini to me, was my maternal Grandma Fulvia’s sister and she died in 1968 when I was three and a half.

The stories I am about to tell you now, fifty years later, are a filtered processing of my mother’s memory, though she is no longer with us, and my own personal childhood memories. 

 

I’ll start here, from the photo of Aunt Mini wearing her work overalls, which is in a ceramic frame that she made. The frame is blue with the furrows left by her fingerprints. My mother kept the photo in her bedroom and I now keep here in my studio.

In part, I think I am what I am – an artist – also thanks to Aunt Mini.

I have a precise image of myself as a child, the clear memory of when Aunt Mini, wearing a white shirt, took me to her studio, the “ceramics school on Via Giorgio Jan”. Standing me before a gigantic mass of clay and taking off my socks, she helped me to climb up this enormous lump the colour of “Sludge” and invited me to touch the substance with my hands and feet. She urged me on, saying: Go on, Maria! You can do it! Squash it! Jump, Maria!

This is how I interpret that moment now: an artist urging another potential artist to touch the substance and thus help her find herself.

The contact with this substance, the wet malleable clay, is what subsequently determined my relationship with painting, which can be briefly summed up thus: perceiving colour as a substance to spread on a two-dimensional surface day after day to leave a trace of my existence in this world. 

 

The Boschi-Di Stefano collection was begun by Grandpa Chichì, my great-grandfather, and continued by Aunt Mini and her husband. Before it became a Museum-Home run by Milan City Council, I managed to visit it for many years when it was still a private home lived in by actual people. I went there from 1965, the year I was born, until 1985 when I left my parents’ home to live alone. I managed to go back there when my Uncle Antonio opened the house for soirées when I went to visit him with mum and when occasionally I plucked up the courage to visit him by myself. I was pretty intimidated by this slightly grumpy and sarcastic uncle.

I lived on the first floor of the house on Via Giorgio Jan and the apartment filled to the brim with works of art was above my head on the second floor. The paintings were hung on three levels. The ones on the lowest level almost touched the floor and were thus almost exactly the same height as me as a child. Hidden from my old uncle, I remember poking my finger into the holes and cuts of a Fontana and grazing the surface of some material paintings such as those by Afro or the more delicate ones by Morandi. I liked having a direct contact with the “thing” which did not give me any sense of awkwardness. This is how the relationship with the works began for me: I thought of them as normal and not at all distant and I saw them not so much as images to contemplate but ideas to touch.

Later I remember during one of the soirées when the house was open to guests, weaving through the people with a small block-notes in hand, writing down comments I heard people making about what they saw and about what they thought of those works and I enjoyed recording the things that I considered so odd.

 

Aunt Mini had embroidered the name “Andrea” on her work shirt. This male name was how she had decided to sign her works. It was a tribute to the ceramicist Andrea Della Robbia.

Marieda Di Stefano Boschi was an artist and expressed herself as much as a woman could in that historical period, in this country and in that precise social context.

She had begun viewing art with her father who had involved her in his passion for collecting. She then continued collecting alongside her husband who gave her a fundamental role in choosing works.

Uncle Antonio stated when he knew that the project to turn their private home into a museum with all their works open to the public was going to happen: “It is not a tribute to the memory of my companion, but it corresponds to reality. A joint work in the total sense: in the material sense with the implications of decisions, of application, of financial sacrifices and subsequent sacrifices in other fields; and in the artistic sense as a harmony of tastes, directions and choices.”

However, I would go further and say that the fact that Uncle Antonio had all but stopped buying works when Aunt Mini died was also because he had also lost her sensitive artist’s gaze. 

I don’t know if Aunt Mini was ever truly aware of this. I am not even sure if she ever used the word artist to describe herself, but I do know that she dedicated much of her life to expressing something about herself through art.

Aunt Mini gave her niece, my mother, a copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions with a bookmark placed where the philosopher talks about the concept of moulding the substance: “Lord, have you not taught me that before you imparted form and distinction to that formless matter there was nothing – no colour, not shape, no body, no spirit? Yet not nothing at all, no, not that either, for there was some kind of formlessness with no differentiation”. My mother kept this book in the drawer of her bedside table and she wanted to pass on these words to me because she said that her aunt considered them central to her thinking about art.

She was a sculptor, mainly using clay to mould bodies: female bodies. No heads, no arms, no feet. There were legs, but they were joined together to create a single block with the trunk. These bodies were empty inside, concave, vases, which potentially could contain anything inside them.

 

In ceramics, it is almost impossible to predefine colour. The coloured powder that is spread wet on the earthenware is not the same as the colour that appears after baking. When the substance enters the kiln, it is transformed to such an extent that it changes its coloration completely due to the high temperature and an alchemical process.

And you as an artist know that what you see at the beginning is not what you will see at the end. You do not choose the colour as it appears, but how you imagine it will be.

This is what Marieda had to contend with when she spread a patina on her sculptures, and this is what I as a painter have kept with me in my work. The colour happens, it is not determined, it can only be accepted and accommodated.

 

I have already talked about the degrees of kinship between Aunt Mini and me. I did so to highlight that this direct line which passes from generation to generation from one woman to another can mean a lot in all of our stories.

 

Aunt Mini was a person with great communicative powers. She managed to draw everyone in with her open and welcoming smile. From the end of the war until 1968, she and her husband orchestrated numerous events, concerts and parties at their home which would become a reference point for music and art in Milan in those years. A lot of artists attended those events: from Sergio D’Angelo to Crippa, from Alberto Savinio to Remo Brindisi. When she died, her husband tried not to interrupt that vital flow and for a while he continued to organise those events in Marieda’s name, asking my mother to continue preparing the prawn cocktail with homemade mayonnaise that my mother and I prepared in our kitchen to take to him before the party started in his apartment upstairs.

 

My mother had an innate quality. She knew how to create situations that made people feel comfortable. She continuously created contexts in which small groups of people could be together and share their experiences. Throughout her life, she consistently created dozens of small groups of men and women, above all women, in which people could read, think, study, talk and listen to each other: these were practices through which everyone, starting with her, contributed to a communal reasoning.

She always said to me: Maria, not the diary form (which my father would pursue), but the epistolary form! that is where thoughts open up. It happens just when we imagine talking to someone!

I recently sent a photo of my mother, taken during one of her meetings, to her friend Marina, who responded with these words: Dear Maria, thanks for this photo, which reminds me of how the meetings that Mia knew how to put together brought happiness and understanding between people.

 

For ten years from 2002 to 2012 I organised meetings only and exclusively for artists. These were held in Venice, at first in my studio and later at a foundation for contemporary art. One artist at a time would show their work and talk about it to a group of peers. Everybody sooner or later would be listened to and observed while the others would listen. The need came from the fact that each of us wanted to come out of our respective shell because we wanted to be heard by attentive ears and we also wanted to know what our peers were producing independently in their studios. 

 

In the early 1960s Aunt Mini let my mother use the space on the ground floor of the family home to fulfil a dream of hers: to establish a school for children using music, literature and poetry in a group to experience languages. Aunt Mini always fed off my mum’s energy and my mum fed off hers. After a few years when I was born and my Grandma Fulvia died, my mum left the small school and Aunt Mini took over to transform it into a space dedicated to sculpture. She had her studio in the space and decided to open it up for moments of sharing with other women, establishing a small ceramics school. She created a convivial meeting place in which she tried to transmit her enthusiasm for the subject and where she tried to help everyone bring something out of themselves. The workings of this place went on for many years even after her death thanks to the perseverance of her friend Migno, who understood her, followed her and accompanied her on her vision.

 

 

P.S. A few weeks after writing the above, I found a pamphlet entitled “The home and the museum: opening a door”. It was the brochure for a course that my mother had held together with the Women’s University in Milan in 2003. I have attached it here below. Her words confirm that the small intuitions that I had had went in the same direction as hers.