Ugo Mulas was one of the most important international postwar photographers. Self-taught, his career unfolded in close contact with the artistic and cultural scene in Milan. Mulas photographed the Venice Biennale exhibitions from 1954 to 1972, working in close contact with the artists. His most outstanding projects include his series on Lucio Fontana in 1964 and the reportage on the Sculture nelle città exhibition in Spoleto in 1962, where he met the artists David Smith and Alexander Calder. The series devoted to Ossi di sepia, the collection of poems by Eugenio Montale, also dates from this period.
Having discovered Pop Art at the Venice Biennale in 1964, Mulas decided to go to the United States (1964–67), where he created a book titled New York: The New Art Scene (1967). His meetings with Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, and the discovery of the photographic works of Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander, helped bring about a change in his work in the 1960s, when he moved away from traditional reportage.
Mulas brought about a profound reshaping of the historical function of photography: his aesthetic and phenomenological reflections led to a portfolio on Marcel Duchamp (1972) and to the Archivio per Milano project (1969–72). His last work, Verifiche (1968–72), sums up his experience and interaction with the art world. Mulas died on 2 March 1973, one month before the opening of a retrospective exhibition at the University of Parma and the publication of his book La fotografia.
This photographic portrait of Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994), taken in 1968, show the Italian conceptual artist wearing a striking leather coat, standing in front of two of his iconic Colonna (Column) artworks, towers formed of paper doilies with an internal iron support, that marked the culmination of his early explorations in arte povera. This photograph belongs to a series that Mulas was commissioned to produce for the Italian fashion magazine L’Uomo Vogue, launched in 1967, initially as an appendix to Vogue and then becoming an independent publication. L’Uomo Vogue established a new focus for the public perception of masculine identity and was the first mainstream magazine first to document and steer the substantial change taking place in the representation of the male, taking place in the 1960s and 1970s. The collaboration between Mulas the magazine offered the perfect opportunity to the photographer for experiment with a genre that would become central to his practice, namely portraiture.
Mulas’ photograph of Boetti portrays the artist as an enigmatic figure, almost androgynous in his appearance, his wayward stance, distance gaze and fashionable clothes a radical break with the traditional conception of the male figure. The artist’s outfits also hints at his adventurous spirit and the journeys to come; only a few years later, in 1971, Boetti would travel to Afghanistan for the first time, beginning a relationship with the country that lasted until the artist’s death in 1994, and that would play a central part in many of his most celebrated works, including the Mappa and smaller arazzi. However, this photograph shows the artist at the early stages of his career, and establishes his place among the great suite of postwar Italian artists; Mulas also made portraits of Lucio Fontana, Pino Pascali and Tommaso Trini for L’Uomo Vogue in the same series.
