Hugo Pratt e Corto Maltese. Cinquant’anni di viaggi nel mito

The exhibition presents over 400 works by Hugo Pratt, including drawings, water colours, Indian ink drawings, magazines and rarities and a sort of exhibition within the exhibition displaying, on the 50th anniversary of their publication, all the 164 original plates for A Ballad of the Salt Sea, a classic of comic strip literature in which Corto Maltese made his debut.
The idea of the exhibition, organised by CMS.Cultura and Genus Bononiae and curated by Patrizia Zanotti with the cooperation of Cong – Hugo Pratt Art Properties, is to celebrate Hugo Pratt and the 50 years of his alter ego Corto Maltese: a real twentieth century literary myth, an anti-hero and modern Ulysses who takes us to fascinating places where we once again experience some of the main episodes and protagonists of twentieth century history. That same Corto, born at La Valletta, Malta, in 1887 to an English sailor and an Andalusian gypsy, 1.83 metres tall with honey-coloured eyes and a ring in his left ear, a romantic seafarer and gentleman of fortune, who haunted the dreams of generations of readers.   Hugo Pratt, an expert on humanity and folk, globetrotter, actor, guitar player, but above all a man who employed boundless imagination to draw literature, has given us some of the best pages of intertwined fiction and twentieth century history through a vision of a romantic adventurer that is never banal. Born on the beach at Rimini in 1927, tramp and traveller, but entirely Venetian, he possessed the skill to bring back the importance of the sea to his readers, playing tricks with mirrors, involving imagination and reality, the typical atmosphere of picaresque novels, dangerous women, abstract art and photographic realism.  The exhibition displays not only Corto Maltese but also Anne of the Jungle (1959), Ernie Pike (1961), Sergeant Kirk (1955), and the incredible plates and water colours of the Desert Scorpions that take us to the Ethiopia of 1941-1942, superimposing imaginary characters on historic figures. The exhibition guides the visitor through the numerous literary references that feature in Pratt’s stories: Jack London and American adventure novels, Joseph Conrad, and the poetry of W. Yeats, A. Rimbaud and J. l. Borges, in an intense confrontation with the mark left by masters of American comics such as Milton Caniff and Héctor Oesterheld.

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