Preparatory drawing for the painting of Hilda Lobauer (1956), one of Giuseppe Guerreschi's best-known works, depicting the profile portrait of a young German woman who, as a prisoner, had become an SS collaborator working as a kapo in the concentration camps.
The drawing, in which the author, through a thick pencil sketch, cruelly investigates the physiognomic traits of the woman, was given by the author to Danilo Montaldi in 1967 and became the pretext for an intense exchange of letters between the two friends through which the sociologist from Cremona questions the nature of evil and whether this can transpire in the appearance of a person who is both executioner and victim, echoing with his speech the arguments of A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) by Hannah Arendt, about the story of the Nazi criminal Eichmann condemned in the trial of Jerusalem in 1961.
Guerreschi asks himself: "Why do we painters often use our energies to revive and remember such negative and absurd characters, who instead would be good to disappear completely and definitively?". The question remains unanswered in all of Guerreschi's work aimed at a merciless investigation of the evils of his time (which is still ours) since the answer lies solely in the awareness of the viewer. The drawing is part of the Montaldi-Seelhorst fund donated to the Diotti Museum in 2012.
Donated by Gabriella Montaldi-Seelhostr and Nikolas Montaldi, 2012
