Artist and His Moto Guzzis - Antonio Ligabue

Solace. The word is seldom associated with the allure of motorcycling, but all of us have felt it.  The old cliché ‘you never see a motorcycle parked outside a psychiatrist’s office’ has a core of truth: while riding a bike can be thrilling, there’s a peaceful flip side to the experience. Most riders see-saw between both poles: the excitement of power at your wrist, and the calm of moving through a landscape, alone with your thoughts.  Both these inner states are addictive, and are probably equally responsible for riders’ devotion to their wheels. There’s little written on the subject, perhaps because sex sells, and motorcycles’ sexy side gets the headlines.

For legendary ‘outsider’ artist Antonio Ligabue, motorcycling – once he discovered it – became an integral part of his self-help.  His story is tragically inspiring, as he was truly an outsider even in childhood, cast out of his family and even his native country, tormented by adversities, uprootings, loneliness, hunger, misery, and mental illness, yet producing amazing drawings, paintings, and sculptures that are considered national treasures today in his adopted Italy.  While he lived at various times in institutions, private homes, and even a rudimentary riverside hut, eventually the art he’d compulsively created began to sell, and when he had sufficient money the first thing he bought was a new Moto Guzzi…and eventually he owned 16.  Ligabue is not famous outside Europe, but there’s a museum dedicated to him in his home town of Gualteri, and his life story has been the subject of many books, television series, and films, including the most recent prizewinning dramatization ‘Volevo Nascondermi’ (Hidden Away, 2020), which we’ve linked in our Film section.

Antonio Ligabue was born December 18th 1899 in Zurich to an unwed mother, Elisabetta Costa, who lived in Frauenfeld, working as a day laborer.  Elisabetta was Italian, and soon met and married  another Italian, Bonfiglio Laccabue, a native of Gualtieri in Reggio Emilia.  Bonfiglio adopted Antonio, giving him the surname Laccabue, and making him, according to the laws of the time, a default citizen of Gaulteri.  Despite this couple’s union, they were marginalized and impoverished laborers living in a precarious state, so when Antonio was 9 months old they entrusted him to a Swiss couple, who were childless but only marginally better off.  Antonio suffered the effects of years of malnutrition, his vitamin deficiencies giving him rickets and a mal-formed skull, with consequent mental disabilities.  He learned to speak late, and exhibited an occasionally violent temperament.

 

There were no special facilities for ‘different’ individuals from poor families in the early 1900s, and Antonio was repeatedly moved from various schools due to his disruptive outbursts.  In 1913 he was handed off to a Swiss couple, Johannes Valentin Göbel and Elise Hanselmann, who were also childless and poor itinerant laborers.  Antonio’s health continued to deteriorate from malnourishment, and his mental health from an abusive adoptive father, and unhealthy relationship with his adoptive mother.  His last school was led by evangelical priest in Marbach, but he was expelled in 1915 because he habitually blasphemed and was caught numerous times masturbating. He did learn to read, but found his greatest solace in drawing, at which he showed astonishing facility even as a child.  In 1917 he experienced a violent nervous breakdown, and was hospitalized for three months.

He did his best to repress his anger at this lifelong mal-treatment, abuse, and ailments, but it came out in furious bursts; in 1919 he attacked his adopted mother during a fight over his personal habits, and she called the police, who escorted him out of Switzerland and directly to Gualtieri, regardless he didn’t speak Italian and knew nobody there.  She terribly regretted the decision, but never saw him again.  Now a stranger in a strange land, a few Gualteri locals (the ones not taunting him openly) took pity on him, providing him food and shelter at a hospice for the poor.  In 1920 he was given a job as a laborer building a road on the banks of the Po river, where he moved into an abandoned farm shed, living in very rustic conditions: taking water from the river, gathering wood for heat, eating very simply, and living with animals – he collected mice and rats, cats and dogs, occasional goats, sheep, birds, etc, plus various insects, all welcomed in a kind of menagerie. He studied the animals he encountered closely, and made carefully observed sculptures using clay dredged from the riverbanks.  Many of these survive today.

Antonio began painting in 1928, when he met local artist Renato Marino Mazzacurati, who recognized his talent and taught him how to use oil paints, giving him guidance and space to work.  This was a transformative relationship, and Ligabue devoted himself totally to painting, when not strolling for hours along the river Po. In 1937 Antonio harmed himself in a fit of self-destruction, and was hospitalized in Reggio Emilia. In 1941 the sculptor Andrea Mozzali discharged him from the psychiatric hospital and lodged him at his home in Guastalla. During WWII, Ligabue, a native German speaker, worked for the Italian army as an interpreter for German troops, but in 1945, he attacked a German soldier with a bottle, and was returned to the asylum for the next three years. He continued to paint and draw at a furious pace while hospitalized.

By 1948 his art was discovered by journalists, critics and art dealers, and suddenly he had sufficient income to buy what he had always longed for – a motorcycle.  Specifically, a 1937 Moto Guzzi GTV 500, with which he tooled around the countryside, enjoying his freedom and the solace of the quiet hillside roads of the Reggio Emilia region.  He cut quite a figure, typically carrying paintings on his back – many of his paintings have holes where he looped rope around his body to secure them. At times he was so entranced by riding he’d forget to fill his tank with gasoline, and had to push his motorcycle to the nearest farm or filling station.  He had no driving license – it was not possible with his psychiatric history – and was stopped many times by police, with the fines being sent to whomever was hosting him at the time.  But a loophole in the law preventing ‘crazy’ people from driving was found; in a bureaucratic oversight, the law did not apply to motorcycles!  He had changed his name to Legabue in his youth, not wanting to be associated with the man who had abandoned him, but the license was in his real name, Laccabue, so he refused to sign it.

So, Ligubue found two escapes from the misery of his life: art and motorcycles, a heady combination, and one many artists can relate to, including myself.  Eventually he would own 16 Moto Guzzis – always in red.  Such was the bond with his Moto Guzzis that he included them in two self portraits, from 1952 and ’53, ‘Self-portrait with Motorcycle’ and ‘Self-portrait with Motorcycle, Easel and Landscape’. The Italian journalist  Edmondo Berselli, who knew Ligabue in this period, recounted how he loved to ride his motorcycle in his most desperate moments, “because the roaring and hot cylinder head of the Guzzi was the only consolation against the cold of winter and the unfathomable hostility of the world.”

His work was subsequently included in several group exhibitions, and in 1961 he had his first solo exhibit at the Galleria La Barcaccia in Rome; his work became widely celebrated and avidly collected. He remained a tormented and lonely soul, but the success of his art, and the consequent respect he received from local villagers in Gualteri, presented some relief.  He had a bad motorcycle accident later that year, and suffered from nerve damage that nearly paralyzed him.  In 1963, he had a major retrospective in Guastalla, organized by the gallerist Vincenzo Zanardelli, which made his reputation across Europe as one of the most important Italian artist of the 20th Century.  Antonio Ligabue had truly made it as an artist, and he died at the pinnacle of his acclaim in May 1965, at the age of 65.

In the years since his death, his reputation has only expanded in Europe, especially with the increasing acceptance of ‘outsider’ art in the wider art world, best signified by the inclusion of outsider artists in the 2013 Venice Biennale.  Ligabue’s story has been told in several books in different languages, and in two film projects: a 1977 trilogy on Italian TV, and the 2020 film ‘Volevo Nascondermi’ (Hidden Away), which won numerous awards at film festivals across Europe.   You can watch the trailer here, and follow the links on the page to watch the full film on Mubi.