ST. GALLEN.- One hundred years ago, in May 1919, Antonio Ligabue (1899–1965, originally named Anton Costa, and after his adoption Antonio Laccabue), who grew up in Eastern Switzerland, was deported from his native country. After various relocations in the city of St. Gallen and the canton of St. Gallen, the nineteen-year-old was sent “home” from his last residence in Romanshorn in the canton of Thurgau to Gualtieri, Reggio Emilia, a home that had never been his own. Gualtieri was the hometown of his adoptive father Bonfiglio Laccabue, whom he never met, since he was taken away from his birth mother at nine months and put in the care of foster parents. However, Ligabue did not have Swiss citizenship, and although Switzerland was the country of his birth, Gualtieri remained his official hometown. Antonio Ligabue had nothing and no one in Italy. He grew up with Swiss German and did not speak Italian. As a foreigner in Switzerland, he came to Italy, a foreign country to him. Between all these borders, he was always the “other.” Homeless, without connections, and without a sense of direction, he lived in the woods in a hut or a barn—wherever he could find shelter. At the time, no one suspected that he would become a famous artist, despite all the challenges he faced. Today he attracts large audiences in Italy as the “Italian Van Gogh.” In his native Switzerland, however, he is almost unknown. Here he has forever remained a foreigner. For the first time, Antonio Ligabue will now be presented in his lost homeland, and his work will be shown in St. Gallen, where he spent the formative years of his life. One hundred years after his deportation from Switzerland, Ligabue is now being reinterpreted as the “Swiss Van Gogh.”

Antonio Ligabue is usually discussed as a solitary figure, with an emphasis on the uniqueness of his work. The exhibition at the Museum im Lagerhaus now presents Ligabue within the culture of his homeland. This includes the tradition of “untrained masters” in peasant painting and a contextualization of Ligabue’s artistic oeuvre within the region’s culture. Eastern Switzerland in particular has produced a number of famous practitioners of Naive Art and Art Brut, including Adolf Dietrich (1877–1957), Hans Krüsi (1920–1995), and Hedi Zuber (1916–1996), whose biographies and artistic careers show a variety of parallels to Ligabue.

The participation of Sandro Parmiggiani from Reggio Emilia as co-curator of the exhibition and coeditor of this publication made it possible to assemble Ligabue’s works in Italy and realize the exhibition. Sandro Parmiggiani knows Antonio Ligabue’s work like no other and has curated various exhibitions and published books on the artist.

Renato Martinoni, emeritus professor of Italian modern and contemporary literary and cultural history at the University of St. Gallen, has long researched Ligabue’s Swiss biography. For the first time, his contribution to the exhibition and as co-editor of this catalog reveals Antonio Ligabue’s life in eastern Switzerland, which was previously hidden away in archives.

The exhibition Antonio Ligabue: The Swiss Van Gogh is the beginning of an international exhibition trilogy at the museum which will focus on to the “other” in art, illuminating the cultural, sexual and gender-related, and religious facets of this theme. The wide-ranging exhibition project will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation and the Museum im Lagerhaus.