Lea Vergine and Enzo Mari, the art couple kidnapped by the covid

Art "is important because it is not necessary. And the superfluous is what we need to be a little happy", explained the great Lea Vergine with that deep voice that seemed carved by the smoke of her thousands of cigarettes

.

And she added sarcastically:

A sixty-year long work in search of the whys of art, always profound, subversive, cutting, had made her one of the most authoritative, intelligent and innovative voices in the field of criticism.

A couple of art made up of opposites ("We are at the antipodes and our history has worked in a mysterious way" she confessed a few years ago in a nice interview with Repubblica) and perhaps for this very reason very united despite the challenge and continuous conflict.

Her bourgeois and Neapolitan origins, he, a modest Piedmontese family, Enzo Mari and the beautiful Lea Vergine (but her real name was Buoncristiano) had met in Naples at the invitation of Carlo Giulio Argan.

They worked side by side for a year on the creation of an avant-garde magazine, the spark broke out at the end of the assignment.

A loving relationship - both had married very young - which cost them many difficulties in pre-divorce Italy in the 1960s and even arrest for concubinage.

In Milan, where they had moved to live in the Magenta area and where their daughter Meta was born,

These were the tumultuous and complicated years of protest and political fervor

and while Enzo was designing the "useful" objects that earned him a collection of golden compasses, she stood out for her studies on physicality and performative action in art. in 1974 in an epoch-making essay,

a cult text on which generations of editors have trained.

And then with the works on female artists, often forgotten, submerged, even "committed suicide" as she said when interviewed a few years ago by Stefania Gaudiosi, a commitment that merged into another well-known text,

.

Extremely elegant and fascinating, she said with annoyance that she had fought for a life, especially in her Naples, against sexist stereotypes: "They never recognized what you were or did - she said - and all this exteriority is reductive, humiliating, offensive".

Yet authority, in the art world, has never lacked, her texts from

", published by Skira in 1996 in

2000 Skira) to

(2001 Rizzoli) up to

the autobiography in which he recounts his life against the tide, made up of extraordinary encounters, great loves, battles and utopias, were all important and very popular.

Like the many exhibitions she has signed as a curator,

.

"Writing was what I liked best", she said, and then added with that biting tone that characterized her, "because artists are boring, ignorant, full of themselves ... I reserved a certain detachment".

In fact, with Enzo Mari Lea Vergine shared the fierce criticism of the present times, of the "devastating" ignorance of today, a time to which she contested "the lack of dignity, decency, shame".

And the change in roles and the transformations of the art market ("today there are curator managers, critics are very rare") was also firmly stated.

Death caught them practically together, he was 88, she was 82, cloaking the end of a union lasting over 50 years in poignant romance.

The works remain.

And those of Lea Vergine, as the minister of culture Franceschini also points out in recalling her, leave a mark.