LIVING! Julian Beck pittore

Ripense, the new exhibition space of the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, celebrates its opening with an exhibition dedicated to Julian Beck (New York, 1925–1985), the driving force behind and co-founder – alongside his partner, actress Judith Malina – of the most important and revolutionary theatre and artistic collective of the second half of the 20th century, the Living Theatre.

The exhibition highlights a lesser-known talent of the visionary writer, actor and director: in 1943, aged just seventeen, Julian had left his studies at Yale and returned to New York to paint and write. For the next fifteen years, painting would be the primary medium for his artistic exploration: until 1958, Julian exhibited his paintings alongside those of William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko at Peggy Guggenheim’s “Art of this Century” gallery and in other galleries, as part of the Abstract Expressionist movement. His move away from painting towards theatre – a “more social art form” – was not a break but a transition: the formal and expressive tensions of the canvas would become stage writing, body, gesture and presence.

Organised in collaboration with the Fondazione Morra, which holds the Living Theatre Archive entrusted by Judith Malina to Peppe Morra, the exhibition brings together paintings and drawings created between 1944 and 1958, alongside photographs, posters, sketches, stage costumes, invitations, video screenings featuring excerpts from theatre performances, and documents. The approximately 40 works on display convey the coherence of Julian Beck’s creative journey. This is confirmed by Julian’s return to painting in 1982 when, for “The Yellow Methuselah”, he created an imposing painted backdrop inspired by Kandinsky – not merely a decorative element but a dynamic extension of painting into the stage space, capable of engaging with the theatrical action and defining its perceptual rhythm.

The title of the free exhibition naturally evokes the Living Theatre but also sounds like an invitation to embrace the vital momentum of art, its ability to set thought and action in motion, both within and beyond the frame of the painting.