Through the efforts of a journalist friend,
Mulas became, from 1954 to 1968, the official
photographer of theVenice Biennale.As such, he
was able to document meetings between artists,
art dealers, curators, exhibition designers, and he
captured the ‘‘behind the scenes’’ story while the
huge exhibition was being set up in numerous
different halls and buildings. But these pictures
oscillate between two poles: the documenting of
events considered fashionable, such as parties,
gatherings in bars (as in the photograph of the
French sculptor Ce ́sar in discussion with a Japa-
nese couple) and capturing events related to the
artistic life of the Biennale (i.e., the 1962 work
showing Alberto Giacometti receiving the Bien-
nale’s Grand Prize in which Mulas focused on
the emotion on the face of the Italian sculptor as
he attempts to hide his sentiment with his hands,
or the 1964 pictures of Robert Rauschenberg in a
gondola on the Grand Canal).
In 1962, Mulas went to the Italian city of Spo-
letto, which hosts a yearly municipal arts festival, to
photograph an outdoor sculpture exhibition that
had been mounted that year. In these works, Spo-
letto is transformed into a night space where urban
architecture and contemporary sculptures are inter-
mingled. In the early 1960s, with his pictures of the
American abstract sculptor David Smith in the
foundry where he forged his monumental sculp-
tures, Ugo Mulas conceived a dialogue between
the artworks and their environment, capturing
another behind-the-scenes artistic activity that had
to that point rarely been seen in photographs. This
dialogue and play between artists and their works
appear as well in the memorable pictures Mulas
captured of Alexander Calder, renowned for his
mobiles, in Sache ́, France, in 1961, and in Calder’s
studio in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Mulas’s work in
this area became a model for other pictures featur-
ing sculptors with their works in the studio or situ-
ated in specific places.
From 1964 to 1969, Ugo Mulas, with the help of
gallery owner Leo Castelli and writer Alan Solomon,
undertook several stays in New York, where he
embarked on an important series of pictures of lead-
ing American artists of the era. Most show the artists
in various environments, and they include sculptors
John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal,
Marcel Duchamp (of whom Mulas took a photo-
graph studying the famous picture showing him
playing chess with a nude woman); and painters
Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Barnett
Newman, Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg,
James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and
Tom Wesselmann. These photographic series were
collected for the publicationNew York, Arte e per-
sone, in 1967, published in English asNew York: The
New Art Scene.Inthatsameyear,UgoMulashad
his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Il Diaframma
in Milan.
The avant-garde Italian painter Lucio Fontana
has been one of Mulas’s primary artist subjects.
Fontana, known for violently slashing the canvases
of his paintings to create a clear space where every-
thing—action, time, and light—converge in a point
of violent paroxysm, is featured in a 1964 photo-
graphic series which is indicative of a transition in
Mulas’s career. These photos describe moments, sus-
pended in time, before Fontana employed a knife to
make cuts in the canvas. Mulas amplifies the artist’s
action by emphasizing contrasts and by focusing on
the artist’s body movements.
After this series, Mulas’s work becomes more
poetic as well as becoming illustrations for poetry.
He began to photograph Monterosso in Liguria,
where his sea scapes might be said to have become
part of a four-hand opusAllegria di Ungarellion
which Mulas and the poet Eugenio Montale colla-
borated in 1969.
In the late 1960s, as Mulas began rethinking his
photographic aims, he worked on a number of
theatrical productions, particularly with the direc-
tor Virginio Puecher inWozzeck, an Alban Berg
opera, in 1969–1970, and Benjamin Britten’s opera
The Turn of the Screw, in 1969. Mulas had pre-
viously worked as a theatrical photographer with
Giorgio Strehler for Carlo Bertolazzi’s El nost
Milanin 1955–1956, for Bertold Brecht’sThree-
penny Opera, in 1955–1956, and for Bertold
Brecht’sLife of Galileo.But the works of the late
sixties first brought together projections of archi-
tecture images and landscapes brought to the egde
of abstraction through use of solarization.
During the last two years of his life, Mulas con-
ceived a final work, which can be seen as a theore-
tical and photographic legacy. This series entitled
La Verifiches (The Verifications) of 1971–1972,
condenses, in some ten pictures that are accompa-
nied by texts relating his reflections upon photo-
graphy, his lifetime of photographic experience.
The titles evoke the various aspects of photo-
graphic practice and include: Tribute to Nie ́pce;
Photographic operation; self-portrait for Lee Fried-
lander; Time in photography, to J. Kounellis; The
blow-up, the sky for Nini; The laboratory, one hand
developed, the other one fixed, to Sir John Frederick
William Herschel; Lenses, to Davide Mosconi,
photographer; Sunlight, diaphragm, exposure time;
Optics and space, to A. Pomodoro; The legend, to
Man Ray.MULAS, UGO