Biography

Diana Baylon was born in Bevagna (Perugia) on June 19, 1920. Her father is an aviator pilot, which is why she moves a lot since she was a child. You learn to discover freedom through flight; she falls in love with light and great horizons. All this will influence her both as a woman and as an artist. She is a woman who is not afraid, that she looks far, upwards, towards a dream that she is not willing to abandon. Precisely for this reason she does not allow herself to be disheartened by the male-dominated and patriarchal prejudices of her era, which see women only as a mother, extraneous to the world of work and therefore also of art. Like many other female artists or authors have done in the past, she too initially decided to sign her works with a masculine name – like Matteo – so that her work could be considered seriously and worthy of attention. In 1938 she finished her studies in Florence, and in 1940 she married Pier Nicola Ricci, with whom she divorced after the birth of two children, a scandal for the mentality of the time. She rediscovers her emotions when she was a child thanks to Beppe Baylon, who was also an aviator and she was her companion until her death. She will never recover from the death of her lover in 2005. Diana Baylon dies on April 14, 2013 in Florence; on her tomb there is written a sentence that fully represents her: “romantic and Etruscan I am / lightly / so that death does not scare me”.

Philosophy

Diana Baylon began practicing art around 1940 as a self-taught person, first with ceramics, then with drawing and figurative painting. Over time, she approaches abstractionism; everything she learns comes from her encounters with collectors and artists, but also from the artisan shops that she frequented with great curiosity. In 1960 the artist creates an oil on canvas that she considers the prototype of her for her pragmatic art and then, from 1962 until the end of the 1970s, she devoted herself to sculpture, mainly creating metal works. In the summer of 1969, at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, a Parisian studio and a Florentine gallery simultaneously exhibited some of her works together with those of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet and Lucio Fontana. The artist then decides to leave metal sculpture and devote himself to other forms of expression. In 2012, the Department of Drawings and Prints of the Uffizi Galleries selected twelve works by Diana Baylon to be included in its collection, including the preparatory drawing of the sculpture L’Unione (The Union) donated to the open-air museum of Castagno. Her style can be summarised in these artist’s words: “Geometry as grammar and as a channel of the imagination predispose me to the adventure of chance”.

Artwork in Castagno

Among the artists of the cycle of frescoes present in Castagno, the first nucleus of the open-air museum, there are no female artists: only among the signatures of the sculptures that from 1976 to 2004 enriched the collection of the Borgo Museo are two names of women, Diana Baylon and Chiara Coda. Diana Baylon had a relationship of deep esteem and sincere friendship with Tommaso Paloscia and so, for the open-air museum founded by the well-known art critic and friend, she left a stone sculpture, The Union, as a gift to Castagno. The work depicts a sort of “embrace” and clearly shows both the artist’s favorite geometric language and her attraction to the sky: this second aspect undoubtedly refers to the work of both her father and her second husband, both aviators. The artist is fascinated by the “verticality” that somehow has always been part of her life, of her dearest affections, of her daily life: in her artistic expression, where the feeling always stands out, it becomes a characteristic element that we find in the shapes and in the volumes of many of his works, even here, in this “joint” which has become almost a symbol in the art of Diana Baylon. This embrace, a human gesture of tenderness but also strong as stone, a sign of love and union, extends upwards as if it wanted to repeat itself over and over again. This eternal embrace is a symbol that we can find in various versions, sizes and materials, even in pendant format for necklace or earring: yes, Diana Baylon was also a jewelry designer. So we like to think that her most precious jewel is here, in the Via delle artiste donna (Women artists’ street) of the Borgo Museo.