The Lyceum

The Lyceum

For the full programme of ‘The Early Seasons of Man’ at the Lyceum Club, see theflr.net/qfmqpl (in Italian).   The International Lyceum Club of Florence recently announced its public programme for 2015. On the theme ‘The Early Seasons of Man,’ the Lyceum will present

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Thu 05 Mar 2015 1:00 AM

For the full programme of ‘The Early Seasons of Man’ at the Lyceum Club, see theflr.net/qfmqpl (in Italian).

 

The International Lyceum Club of Florence recently announced its public programme for 2015. On the theme ‘The Early Seasons of Man,’ the Lyceum will present more than 50 free concerts, exhibitions, lectures and workshops, most at the club’s current home in the Palazzo Giugni Fraschetti (via Alfani 48). As the club’s current president, Donatella Lippi, explained, the annual programs of this historic women’s club focus on art, literature, music, international relations, science, agriculture and social events. These programs, along with partnerships with other associations and clubs in the city, and close ties with the municipality coupled with its wide spectrum of activities, have made the Lyceum Club a major player on the Florentine cultural scene for 107 years.

 

In 1904, Constance Smedley (1881–1941) founded the International Lyceum Club, in London. She soon started sister chapters in Berlin and Paris and, in 1908, the International Lyceum Club of Florence. A writer, Smedley was a feminist who belonged to the nonviolent wing of the suffragette movement. That she was physically disabled in no way limited her achievements: she contributed significantly to advancing women’s rights, internationalism and the avant-garde theatre of the early twentieth century. Her dream was to create a network of Lyceum Clubs throughout the world, to provide places where women involved in literature, journalism, art, science and medicine could meet ‘as men did in professional clubs.’ One hundred years on, her idea ‘to establish centres of intellectual and artistic life’ that would ‘promote interchange and thought between the cultured women of all nations’ is a reality.

 

Knowing that an influential woman could help further her project, she nominated Lady Frances Balfour (1858–1931), daughter of the duke and duchess of Argyll, and sister-in-law of the British prime minister, Arthur Balfour, as the London chapter’s first president. Likewise, after Smedley and her painter husband attended preliminary meetings in Florence, the first presidency of the fledgling club was entrusted to countess Beatrice Pandolfini dei Principi Corsini (1868–1955).

 

Since its inception, the Florence chapter has always attracted highly committed women. Among the earliest members was writer and activist Amelia Pincherle Rosselli (1870–1954), whose anti-fascist sons Carlo and Nello Rosselli were murdered in 1937, most probably by the regime, while they were in exile in France. Another was doctor and writer Gina Lombroso (1872–1944), daughter of criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Together, they founded the Associazione divulgatrice donne italiane in 1917 to publish pamphlets on women’s issues, education and social problems. Given the cosmopolitan nature of the city, many expats were also members of the Lyceum, among them English artist Florence Blood and French-born painter Elisabeth Chaplin.

 

The Lyceum’s members were also influential and well connected, and from the first showed themselves to be eager to take on big tasks. For example, the earliest major event that the Florence Lyceum Club, then in via Ricasoli, hosted was Italy’s first exhibition on Impressionism, held in 1910. It was organised by the writer and painter Ardengo Soffici, along with Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini, who had, in 1908, founded La Voce, one of the most important Italian cultural magazines of the 1900s. To mount the show, they turned to their contacts in Paris, approaching artists Maurice Denis and Pablo Picasso as well as art dealers there, and art collectors Egisto Fabbri, Charles Loeser, Bernard Berenson and Gustavo Sforni in Florence. Among the 75 works on display were works by Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists and others, including Head of a Peasant by Vincent Van Gogh; Landscape by Camille Pissarro; Arbres près de Melun by Henri Matisse; Countryside near Bellevue by Paul Cézanne; and, by Edgar Degas, Portrait of a Woman and a pastel. An entire room displayed the sculpture of the Turin-born, Paris-based sculptor Medardo Rossi. Although the art on display in 1910 was new and largely unappealing not only to its visitors but many critics, the effect of it, over time, was ground-breaking. (A fact commemorated in 2007 by Palazzo Strozzi’s hugely popular show, Cézanne in Florence, Two Collectors and the 1910 Exhibition of Impressionism; see theflr.net/1tigor.)

 

Throughout its long history, the International Lyceum Club of Florence has hosted innumerable illustrious guests as exhibitors, lecturers and performers. Among them are painters Llewellyn Lloyd (1927) and Alberto Savinio (1938); futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1931), inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1934); writers Piero Bargellini (1956) and Grazia Deledda (1927), who was the first Italian woman to win a Nobel Prize; and pianist and composer Wilhelm Kempff (1940) and violinist Uto Ughi, who was just nine years old when he played there in 1953.

 

Open to all, the free events sponsored by the Lyceum in 2015 promise to be no less exciting. 

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