Caterina Crepax

Gilberto Crepax, cellist
(Dolo, Venice 1890 – Milan 1970)

A Family Story at La Scala

My grandfather, Gilberto Crepax, had crossed the ocean with his precious cello. He was a member of La Scala’s orchestra, which was to perform on tour in the United States under the baton of Toscanini. The year was 1921. They had met during the First World War in Africa, together with Gabriele D’Annunzio. Toscanini had heard him play and recognised his remarkable talent. After the Second World War, he had selected him as principal cello at the Teatro alla Scala, which had been destroyed in an air raid and then rebuilt. 

As a child, my father, Guido, used to listen to him in silence behind the door while he practised at home, and often he would accompany him to the Theatre. La Scala was his home, too. In the following years, the memory of the sound of that instrument continued to move him, so much so that he dedicated a whole story to it in one of the comic strips of the long saga of adventures of his famous character, Valentina.

Guido Crepax, illustrator and comic book
artist (Milan 1933 – Milan 2003)

 

Other episodes in the Valentina stories are set in La Scala: the theatre boxes can be recognised, as can the winding corridors, the precious chandeliers, the ladies’ elegant gowns. I am very fond of one of them: “Fearless Paper Doll Valentina”, in which my father portrays Valentina as an eleven-year-old with my features, in the part of the paper doll from Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”. In a curious twist or premonition, he draws Valentina/Caterina holding scissors to cut Alice’s playing cards. A tale within the tale.

And here I am, the A Family Story at La Scala granddaughter and daughter of artists, an architect with a deep passion for creating scenery and sculptures. It has been written of me that I make three-dimensional drawings. From an early age, I used to build model theatres and figures cut out of cardboard and this year I will have been creating costume-sculptures out of paper for thirty years, a passion that has become my work. I design and make dreamlike dresses for exhibitions, events, sets, companies and workshops. When Margherita Palli invited me to be part of this exhibition at the Museo della Scala, it was a dream come true. To bring my work to La Scala for the first time, almost as if I were returning to a familiar place. A closing of a circle that reconnects me to my grandfather, through my father. And so, I have set to cutting out feathers of mulberry paper, wings of dragonflies, to folding fan-shaped shells, to rolling up rows of silk paper and pleating old sheets of music, to modelling bodices and sticking together fluffy sleeves of tissue paper

Caterina Crepax, architect and paper artist (Milan 1964)

What emerges are bright, airy tutus, curvy bodices, empty shells simulating moving bodies inside them, shoes bending as if on the feet of some invisible ballerina.

A dream that dances, behind the curtain