Il “naturalismo informale” delle linee d’ombra conradiane

The essay outlines the reflections of the art historian Francesco Arcangeli about the shadow lines that pervade Conrad’s landscapes through the analysis of his essay “Per un racconto di Conrad”, his translation of The Shadow-Line and the documents preserved in the Fondo Arcangeli at the Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio in Bologna. According to Arcangeli, Conrad’s creative process is characterized by a double nature, that is, the divergence between perceptive immediacy and memorial countertime. The study of Conrad’s landscapes, associated with “fauve” and Seurat’s paintings, developed in the same years in which Arcangeli was elaborating the concept of “informal naturalism”, which suggests a backward link with the post-Copernican revolution of Romantic space, as a space which is no longer centered on man but on the immensity of the universe and, at the same time, on the inner exploration of the human being.