“La mostra corrisponde al giornale, il museo corrisponde al libro”: il contributo di Franca Helg alla museografia del dopoguerra

The case of Franca Helg (1920-1989) is, in many respects, unprecedented: architect and museographer, alongside her intense academic and publicist activities, she designed and created some of the main post-war museums and around a hundred temporary exhibitions. However, her professional association with Franco Albini, with whom from 1951 (and until the architect’s death in 1977) she shared a studio, ended up obscuring her contributions. The Genoese museums of Palazzo Rosso, the Treasury of San Lorenzo, and Sant’Agostino, and the Eremitani in Padua, are in fact generally attributed to the hand of master Albini, while Helg, always in the background, is often not even mentioned. Even more seriously, her real contributions are never made explicit, at planning or theoretical level. This paper aims to initiate studies on Helg by highlighting her design and theoretical contributions to post-war museography and museology, also through her writings (published and unpublished) and an analysis of a part of her archive.