Palma Bucarelli (1910–1998)

Palma Bucarelli was born in Rome and earned a degree in literature from the University of Rome, La Sapienza. In 1933, she passed the examinations held by the National Ministry of Education for inspector of antiquities and fine arts. As a young art historian, she was assigned to the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Later she worked in a museum in Naples, where she frequented the salon of Benedetto Croce. In July 1941, she took charge of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (National Gallery of Modern Art), becoming the first woman director of an Italian public museum. There she was responsible for protecting the museum's collections from damage during World War II; she arranged to place paintings and sculptures in hiding places in the Palazzo Farnese and Castel Sant'Angelo.

After the war, she oversaw exhibitions of works at the Galleria by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the Gruppo di Via Brunetti. She was one of the Italian delegates to the First International Congress of Art Critics, held in 1948 in Paris. Palma Bucarelli ran the Galleria for 30 years, and her strong support for Abstract and other avant-garde and innovative works made international headlines. In 1963, she
married her longtime partner, journalist Paolo Monelli. After her death, her personal art collection was donated to the Galleria. Her famously elegant wardrobe was donated to the Museo Boncompagni Ludovisi for the decorative arts in Rome. A street near the Galleria was renamed in her memory. The Galleria mounted a retrospective show about her influence, "Palma Bucarelli: Il museo come avanguardia," in 2009. She was the author of numerous museum catalogues and two books, including 1944, Cronaca di sei mesi (1944: Chronicle of Six Months) published in 1997 and Arte a Roma fra 1945 e 1946 (Art in Rome from 1945 to 1946) published in 2010.