This is my favorite picture of my New Year Eve – getting ready for a big dinner

party.   All the dishes lining up, waiting, promising many surprises and now blank

holding many ideas of what might come.  But instead of thinking too much about

the food to come I started looking at a beautiful present I just received

 the  Azimut book,  with the two issues of  the  Azimuth magazine –  art and artists in Milano – an essential document of the radical new conception

of art at the end of 1950’s.

Eduarda Emilia Maino, was the female presence in the Azimuth group. She exhibited her work under the name Dadamaino. Here, one of the pieces from her first solo show in Milanio, “Volume”, 1958

“Achrome” literally means “without color”.One of the founders of Azimuth magazine and Azimut Gallery, Piero Manzoni would not live to see the influence of his work, dying at age 30 of a heart attack in his studio. Here, “Achrome”, 1962

An atypical gallery, Azimut during its eight-month period was the site of thirteen exhibitions. Agostino Bonalumi , an abstract painter very influential in Italy, also explored painting as object, Milan, here “Grey”, 1961.

70 eggs were hard boiled then passed to guests, all signed and numbered. Consumption of Art by an Art devouring public. Here,” Egg No. 21 “– not eaten. 1960.

Azimut is an Arabic word meaning “the Arc of the Horizon”. Only two issues,  Azimuth 1 and Azimuth 2, were printed in Milano in September 1959 by Castellani and Manzoni. It followed a few months later with the opening of Galleria Azimut. Through this independent magazine, and independent gallery they created a new way of positioning themselves in the art system. Both the magazine Azimuth, and the gallery Azimut, would become the perfect place for confrontations within the art community and the expression of new and conflicting ideas.