Porza Cultural Association. So, immediately, zigzagging through Porza's little stories, this strange, never heard of Association appears online. A poor little page on the internet. From research to research, a cultural movement of impressive dimensions emerges from nowhere and becomes increasingly clearer, which always revolves, from 1923 to 1940, around Porza, the village that overlooks Lugano from the hill. Porza, always Porza in a growing multitude of names, lists, exhibitions, magazines, documents and correspondence in Italian, German, French, Dutch... Nothing is known about Porza, they look at me with disbelief when I go on reeling off names, dates, characters, documents, testimonies and each piece forms an orderly, consequential mosaic. Until in the municipal council room I point to an oil view of Porza by an "unknown" artist although well signed at the bottom left: A. Bryks. Bryks? Never heard. Then a fresco, or rather two in the two houses where he lived in Porza: a popular scene, women and children, and a delicate Annunciation: the Madonna has Middle Eastern features but in the background the lake and the hills of Lugano. Then documents, paintings, his daughter Ly born in Porza in 1926, a grandson, Livio Negri, dedicated to the memory of his painter grandfather and his musician father...
Three artists, one intuition
It all began in Porza in 1923. Arthur Bryks (1893-1970) comes from some years spent in Ascona, protagonist of the cultural environment alongside César Domela, Hans Looser, Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin and other artists. And first from Zurich where he saw the Dada movement develop. And before that from Basel where he studied at the conservatory and became a synagogue cantor. Jew from a Hasidic family from Falkow, eastern Poland, at the time under Tsarist Russia, he drew, painted, worked with ceramics and frequented artistic circles. Like his wife Vena Weinmann in Porza he is attracted by the peasant simplicity, by the houses overlooking the crest of the hill, by the view of the lake and the hills of Lugano. “Our paradise,” daughter Ly will always say. His wife Vena created a weaving atelier there, “Tissus Bryks Porza”, soon also active in Amsterdam and Paris. Arthur creates a simplified model of loom, patents it with the name of Porza, and after the war it will become the working tool of his Pedagogical re-education institute for veterans from Buchenwald, where some of his family members died.
In Porza he becomes familiar with the baron Alvo Werner von Alvensleben (Berlin 1889-Torricella 1962), Berlin aristocracy, and the Ticino sculptor Mario Bernasconi (Pazzallo 1899-Lugano 1963), today remembered in the museum dedicated to him in Pazzallo. Three totally different biographies but an iron, double bond: art and Porza. Progressive art, which looks to the future as a force for aggregation. From their friendship was born La Porza, Porza cultural association, supranational movement for cultural meetings and exchanges. Initially it revolves around Porza houses, Porza Häuser: one or more houses in different countries where artists can get to know each other and work in an international network of residencies. In total there will be about forty in Europe, one also in South America. And one in Ticino, at Ronchetto di Cadempino, at the entrance of which the Porza symbol is still frescoed: a yellow circle in a blue triangle: the sun in the sky. In the background, on the one hand, the now consolidated experience of the Bauhaus of Weimar, the creativity of Zurich and the libertarian model of the Monte Verità of Ascona, which in those years was accentuating its artistic value. But also the pacifist, internationalist and anarchist circles of Lugano, the meeting place of the café White art, among journalists (Vinicio Salati, Cesco Manzoni) intellectuals and passionate discussions on art and politics. For Arthur Bryks Porza it is Ascona sul Ceresio: here too he proposes, complete with a form, to create a Museum of Modern Art, and the mayor Luigi Somazzi agrees.
Berlin-Paris, an explosive success
The founding impulse of 1923 was followed by years of preparation, work, participation in cultural events in Lugano and international contacts. The idea of a free meeting space for European artists and intellectuals has explosive diffusion. When, in early 1927 La Porza arrives in Berlin in a very short time and becomes a cultural point of reference with art exhibitions, concerts, conferences, debates, meetings, congresses (Porza-Tagungen), cinema and theater evenings. We give ourselves a statute, an organization, an articulated program. In Berlin, “Porza” is published, a magazine in multiple languages, including Italian; it is printed in Charlottenburg, an issue also in Lugano, by Natale Mazzucconi. It informs about the increasingly complex activity of the Association with interventions, cultural reflections, programs and art news.
The first major event in Berlin was the exhibition at the Grand Hotel am Knie, December 1927-January 1928. In addition to the three founders, it presented works by around thirty painters, sculptors and architects of the caliber of Ewald Matarè, Vasily Kandinsky, Max Dungert , Kaethe Kollwitz, Marianne Werefkin, Alexej Jawlensky, Georg Muche, Nicolay Wassillieff, Otto Niemeyer-Holstein, Arthur Segal and others. In short, important personalities converged in Porza such as the director of the powerful Telefunken company, Georg Graf von Arco, the writer and founder of the Paneuropa-Union, Count Richard Nikolaus of Coudenhove-Calergi (Austrian politician and philosopher, the first to propose a project of united Europe), the composer Paul Hindemith, the screenwriter Walther von Hollander, the writers Walter von Molo (co-founder of the International Pen) Fritz von Unruh and Arnold Zweig. Artists of the caliber of Josef Albers, Erich Buchholtz, Max Dungert, Otto Freundlich, the Dadaists Hannah Höch and Richard Hülsenbeck, Käthe Kollwitz, Ewald Mataré, Georg Muche, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Oskar Nerlinger, Thea Schleusner, Rudolf Schlichter. Shortly afterwards, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Milly Steger and the modern art gallery owners Alfred Flechtheim and Karl Nierendorf, dealer of Paul Klee, Otto Dix and Kandinsky, joined the group. La Porza is at the center of cultural life and under its name exhibitions follow one another (also in Frankfurt and Amsterdam), conferences, meetings and conferences at a dizzying pace.
At the center of European culture
On an organizational level, La Porza is guided by a Great Committee. Each sector of art and culture is represented by subcommittees directed by leading figures: Max reinhardt (theater), Alfred Doblin (literature), Fritz Lang (cinema), Bernhard Hoetger (sculpture), Alfred Renger-Patzsch (photography) e Albert Einstein (physics), as documented by a letter from September 1930 from Alvo von Alvensleben to Albert Renger-Patzsch, preserved at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
When the Nazis came to power, many of its Jewish members were persecuted or murdered. Porza disappears from the Berlin and German scenes, becoming the European libertarian counterpart of the dictatorship. He moves to Paris, where La Porza France experienced a powerful relaunch with a refined organisation, dozens of sections in the capital, in the districts and in various countries including India and Brazil, hundreds, thousands of members gathered in precise lists with names, skills, addresses, telephone numbers. The most prominent exponents of the cultural world are part of it - from André Maurois to René Clair, Paul Valery, Raoul Dufy, Le Corbusier, Georges Vantongerloo, etc. – around the figure of Jacques Viénot, art historian, pioneer of industrial aesthetics. The aim remains that of promoting a transnational exchange which, together with culture, also motivates politics. From 1933 to 1940 concerts and exhibitions were organized in Paris, the most important being "De l'idée à la forma” at the Musée Galliera in 1939 with very large participation. An impressive and omnipresent development on the intellectual and artistic scene. Until the outbreak of the war, its total disappearance and the current, gradual recovery.
