For fun, I thought I would list a trio
of modern Italian painters of interest, provide wiki bios and links,
and show a few examples of their work. Then, I'm going to spend the
day with my precious little daughter, because as much as I love art
and literature, it is the love of my wife and daughter that keeps me
going every day. They are true treasures.
Here we go
Mario Mafai:
(from Wikipedia)
Mario Mafai (12 February 1902 – 31
March 1965) was an Italian painter. With his wife Antonietta Raphaël
he founded the modern art movement called the Scuola Romana, or Roman
school.
Mafai left school very early,
preferring to attend, with Scipione, the Scuola Libera del Nudo, or
free school of the nude, of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. His
influences in those years were Roman galleries and museums, and the
Fine Arts Library at Palazzo Venezia.
He met painter and sculptor Antonietta
Raphaël in 1925, and they married. In 1927 Mafai exhibited for the
first time, with a show of studies and maquettes organised by the
Associazione Artistica Nazionale in Via Margutta. In 1928 he had a
second exhibition, at the XCIV Mostra degli Amatori e Cultori di
Belle Arti, as well as a collective with Scipione and other painters,
at the Young Painters Convention of Palazzo Doria in 1929.
In November 1927, Mafai and Raphaël
moved to 325 via Cavour in Rome, and made a studio there. Within a
short time, it became a meeting point for writers such as Enrico
Falqui, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Libero de Libero and Leonardo Sinisgalli,
as well as the young artists Scipione and Renato Marino Mazzacurati.
A few paintings:
Emanuele Cavalli
(Frrom Wikipedia)
(b. 1904-d. 1981) was an Italian
painter belonging to the modern movement of the Scuola Romana (Roman
School). He was also a renowned photographer, who experimented with
new techniques since the 1930s.
Son of Apulian landowners, Cavalli
moved to Rome in 1921 and there he became a student of Italian
painter Felice Carena, also attending the local art college. In 1926
he exhibited some paintings at the Biennale di Venezia, where he
would continue to exhibit regularly.
From 1927 to 1930, Cavalli attended
some expositions together with painters Giuseppe Capogrossi and
Francesco Di Cocco, also travelling to France (1928), where he was
introduced by his friend Onofrio Martinelli to the circle of Italiens
de Paris (i.e., De Pisis, De Chirico, Savinio and others). He
exhibited at the Salon Bovy of Paris with Fausto Pirandello and Di
Cocco, then in 1930 returned to Rome where he joined the Scuola
Romana.
In a series of
exhibitions Cavalli held from 1931 to 1933, the artist began
elaborating Tonalism, a pictorial and aesthetic style that will find
in him one of its best and most refined interpreters, even from the
theoretical point of view. In these exhibitions he received the
support from important art critics and collectors, as well as from
renowned Italian author Massimo Bontempelli, the uncle of his friend
Corrado Cagli and the promoter of "Magic realism", a
literary and artistic movement which had many similarities with
tonalistic painting.
In 1933
Cavalli, together with Capogrossi and Melli wrote the "Manifesto
del Primordialismo plastico" (Manifesto of Plastic
Primordialism) defining the Tonalist Creed, with special emphasis on
the style's spiritual and abstract side. In 1935 and 1943, Cavalli
exhibited a group of paintings at the Quadriennale di Roma,
developing the theme of painting-music relationships: he displayed a
series of feminine figures of different tonalities, and explained
this work within the terms of "contrapuntal sensitivity",
comparing it to a "collection of preludes and fugues in major
and minor tones".[3]
Other important exhibitions were held by Cavalli at the Leonardo da
Vinci Gallery of Florence in 1939 and at the Zodiaco of Rome in 1945,
the latter crowned by the appointment as professor of Painting at
Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze. He thus moved permanently to
Florence with wife Vera Haberfeld.[4] In 1949 Cavalli was affected by
a deep crisis, increased by his professorship not being renewed and
his close friends' change of style towards abstract art.[5]
Cavalli continued to paint for the rest of his life, alternating it
with photography and innovative imaging,[6] receiving important
commissions from public and private organisations.[7]
A few paintings:
Carlo Carra
(From Wikipedia)
Carlo Carrà (February 11, 1881 –
April 13, 1966) was an Italian painter, a leading figure of the
Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of
the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a
number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city
of Milan.
Carrà was born in Quargnento, near
Alessandria (Piedmont). At the age of 12 he left home in order to
work as a mural decorator. n 1899-1900, Carrà was in Paris
decorating pavilions at the Exposition Universelle, where he became
acquainted with contemporary French art. He then spent a few months
in London in contact with exiled Italian anarchists, and returned to
Milan in 1901. In 1906, he enrolled at Brera Academy (Accademia di
Brera) in the city, and studied under Cesare Tallone. In 1910 he
signed, along with Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti the Manifesto of Futurist Painters, and began a
phase of painting that became his most popular and influential.
Carrà's Futurist phase ended around
the time World War I began. His work, while still using some Futurist
concepts, began to deal more clearly with form and stillness, rather
than motion and feeling. Carrà soon began creating still lifes in a
style he, along with Giorgio de Chirico, called "metaphysical
painting". Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the metaphysical
phase gave way to a sombre style akin to Masaccio's. An example from
this period is his 1928 Morning by the Sea.
He is best known for his 1911 futurist work, The Funeral of the
Anarchist Galli. Carrà was indeed an anarchist as a young man but,
along with many other Futurists, later held more reactionary
political views, becoming ultra-nationalist and irredentist before
and during the war, as well as by Fascism after 1918 (in the 1930s,
Carrà signed a manifesto in which called for support of the state
ideology through art).[1] The Strapaese group he joined, founded by
Giorgio Morandi, was strongly influenced by fascism and responded to
the neo-classical guidelines which had been set by the regime after
1937[2] (but was opposed to the ideological drive towards strong
centralism).[3]
He died in Milan in 1966.
A few paintings:
To art, literature, and all those we love and cheerish in our lives.
Cheers
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