The ‘Erased’ Alhambra Decree by Emilio Isgrò at the Israel Museum”

DAVIDE BLEI
Oct 26, 2022
3 min read

During 2021–22, the AIMIG Association and the Emilio Isgrò Archive, in collaboration with the Israel Museum, organized the donation of a major work by the artist, now on display at the Museum. The initiative originated from a meeting between the Museum’s former Director, Ido Bruno, and the artist at his Milan studio during a visit planned as part of the International Executive Council program in February 2020. On that occasion, Emilio Isgrò expressed his wish to donate a work created specifically in honor of the Jewish world to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

PRESS RELEASE

The Erasure of the Alhambra Decree and Imperial Tail is the work by Emilio Isgrò donated to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and inaugurated on October 27, 2022, on the occasion of the visit of the Italian Friends of the Israel Museum (AIMIG).

The Alhambra Decree—also known as the Edict of Granada—was issued on March 31, 1492, by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. The edict ordered the expulsion of Jewish communities from the Spanish kingdoms and their territories as of July 31 of the same year. The only way for Jews to remain in Spain was to convert to Christianity, change their names, and renounce their culture, origins, and traditions. Most of the more than 200,000 Jews who were expelled sought refuge in Portugal, North Africa, and Turkey; others fled to Italy, particularly Venice and Livorno. Thousands never reached their destinations and died along the way.

Created between September 2020 and May 2021 and now on view at the Israel Museum, Isgrò’s work revisits and reinterprets—through the unmistakable language of the Sicilian artist—one of the darkest and most shameful chapters in European history.

The artwork consists of two distinct yet inseparable elements:

a canvas depicting an ancient map of the Iberian Peninsula, on which the toponymy and parts of the iconography along the peripheral border have been erased with acrylic paint;
a casket made of metal framing and glass, containing three sheets of paper placed side by side, featuring black erasures over handwritten text.

Emilio Isgrò (born in Barcellona di Sicilia in 1937) is a conceptual artist and painter, as well as a poet, writer, playwright, and director, and is one of the most important figures in contemporary Italian art. He has lived and worked in Milan since 1956, with a period in Venice (1960–1967) as editor of the cultural pages of Il Gazzettino. His unmistakable style is defined by his famous “erasures,” through which he intervenes on texts by obscuring large portions while leaving selected words or phrases visible.

His career includes numerous participations in the Venice Biennale (1972, 1978, 1986, 1993) and the First Prize at the São Paulo Biennial (1977). In 1986 he presented L’ora italiana at the Museo Civico Archeologico in Bologna, in memory of the victims of the Bologna railway station bombing. He took part in major group exhibitions at MoMA in New York (1992) and at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice (1994). He has published the novel L’asta delle ceneri and returned to poetry with Oratorio dei ladri.

In 2011, The Erased Constitution was presented at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, while Erasure of the Public Debt, a pedagogical work, was inaugurated at Bocconi University in Milan.

In 2016, the city of Milan paid tribute to Isgrò with a three-venue project: a retrospective exhibition at Palazzo Reale, the display of the Erased Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni at the Gallerie d’Italia, and thirty-five erased copies of The Betrothed at Casa Manzoni. In September 2019, the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice presented a major retrospective curated by Germano Celant. In December of the same year, Milan awarded Isgrò the Ambrogino d’Oro. In 2020, his work Colui che sono, erasing Italy’s 1938 racial laws, was presented at the Quirinal Palace.