Some Sunday Italian artists.

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

Sorolla Saturday Night 27 July 2013

Another Saturday night, another work by Joaquín Sorolla.

Three Sails.  Oil on Canvas.  1903.

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida painted Las Tres Velas (Three Sails) on the beach of El Cabañal during the summer of 1903. One of the most luminously eloquent of his many images of the fisherwomen of his native Valencia, Las Tres Velas marks Sorolla's artistic passage to a new level of creativity. Sorolla was already one of the world's most honored painters when he launched his 1903 campaign of open-air painting among the fishing communities on Spain's Mediterranean coast, but in the course of that summer Sorolla pushed his art to a new monumentality and laid claim to a broad new palette of color effects. Lost from public view for a century, Las Tres Velas consolidates a decade of Sorolla's painting experience into an unforgettable image of the womenfolk of his beloved homeland. The asymmetry of Sorolla's eye-catching composition immediately announces the distinctive ambition of Las Tres Velas: three barefoot women of different ages, pulling together as they walk against the wind, are juxtaposed with a sweeping, open line of billowing sails on low-slung fishing skiffs that lumber into shore. Well beyond the picture's edge, the women's progress will intersect with the returning boats, but it is only the empty baskets, swinging awkwardly over the oldest woman's forearms, that connects their purpose to the distant fishing fleet. The very emptiness of the open shore spreading across the lower right corner of the painting emphasizes the unswerving advance of the fisherwomen who know their way without a glance to the boats. Wind snaps their patterned scarves and twists their aprons against their legs; the damp breeze glosses the rude wicker with prismatic color; and the early morning sunlight glances off a feature or a texture with little regard for form or beauty, yet each of the women has her own age, her own identity. One of Sorolla's most ambitious early successes with the theme of the sea La vuelta de la pesca or Bringing in the Catch (Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional) offers a telling comparison to Las Tres Velas. Virtually every Valencian motif to which Sorolla would later return -- billowing sails, brawny oxen, colorfully dressed women, dancing children, and long, streaking shadows -- is introduced in this expansive seascape of about 1897-98. Sorolla's skill at orchestrating color and in marrying complex figural groups is shown to good advantage in La vuelta de la pesca, but the painting gives little indication of the particular gifts that would soon set Sorolla well apart from the vast troupe of marine painters working throughout Europe. By 1901, once again in Valencia, Sorolla took up a subject from the right hand side of the earlier painting, creating Las Sardineras (see fig. 2), a group of women gathered around a tub of fish and the fishwife offering them for sale. Moving his figures well up in the foreground, emphasizing their huddled, pressing eagerness with a jumble of similar baskets, and weaving soft lavendar tints and and acidic green-browns into the prevailing blue and orange color scheme that pulls the women, the sea and the beach into harmony, Sorolla firmly staked a claim to a more sophisticated artistry that would bring so much grace and power to his many subsequent scenes of Valencian fishing life. Finally, in 1903 with Las Tres Velas and perhaps a dozen further seascapes, Sorolla began to make the air and wind, the water and light of Valencia, leading actors as prominent in his paintings as his fisherwomen or bathers; Sorolla's achievement as a profoundly modern master of a realism tempered by abstraction was complete. Sorolla exhibited Las Tres Velas in the Berlin international exhibition of 1904, the last time it would be seen publicly for a century (a black and white photograph in the Sorolla family archives kept the painting's existence on record). Either during the exhibition or shortly thereafter, Las Tres Velas was acquired by Max Steinthal, then one of Berlin's leading bankers. During the mid-1890s, Steinthal and his wife Fanny had built a magnificent home in Charlottenburg, a fashionable, parklike section of Berlin and throughout the first decade of the twentieth-century they built up a collection of both modern and old master paintings displayed throughout the house. Las Tres Velas can be seen hanging above Steinthal's desk in an undated family photo. Steinthal's talents as a financier were as precocious as Sorolla's as a painter: he had been a director of the Deutsche Bank since his early twenties and made an enduring mark on his native city by structuring the complex financing to build Berlin's underground and elevated railways. Steinthal continued to serve the Deutsche Bank as a director well into his eighties, until Nazi proscriptions forced him, as a Jew, to resign in 1939. Soon thereafter, the Steinthals were obliged to sell their home at 119 Uhlanstrasse. Although their sizable family of children and grandchildren escaped the worst of the Nazi persecution, Max and Fanny Steinthal chose to live out the last years of their lives in a hotel in Berlin, dying in 1940 and 1941 respectively, just before they were slated for deportation to a concentration camp. Little of their former life remained to them in those dire years, but Fanny was able to prevent the seizure of their art collection by transferring the works to one of her sons-in-law, a non-Jew, who managed to move the paintings, drawings and prints out of Berlin to Dresden. When that son-in-law, however, chose to flee East Germany following the closure of that sector after the war, he had to leave the crated Steinthal paintings behind. Seized by the GDR as property of a state enemy, the paintings were stored in the basement of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie and forgotten for fifty years. Only with the catastrophic flooding of the Elbe River during the summer of 2002 which threatened much of the artwork and apparatus stored throughout the lower reaches of the Gemäldegalerie complex did the crates come back to light. Through the provenance studies taking place at the museum, the paintings were ultimately returned to the far-flung descendants of Max and Fanny Steinthal.

More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/24130/The-Three-Sails-by-Joaquin-Sorolla-Expected-to-Sell-for-3-to-4-Million-USD-at-Sotheby-s#.UfSgRFO9z6U[/url]
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The differing ages of the three women from Valencia, the asymmetrical layout between the huddled women and the evenly distributed boats, and the intersecting lines against the wind that can be drawn where the women and the boats will meet outside of the painting make this, for me, a wonderful painting.  And then there is the baby in the mother's arms, head wrapped in that red cloth that reminds me of the color of a sun that might shine over a much more violent ocean than the one depicted here.  The baskets the women carry are empty, the boats are full, but we know this is soon to change.  The young woman and the old look down and ahead, the former to perform these first duties of labor, the latter having done them all her life.  And the mother looks out at us, a midpoint between youth and age.  I almost want her to stop, to let the other two pass, and to come closer.  I want to talk to her, and hear her child laugh.  But she must go along the beach to meet her destiny.

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida painted Las Tres Velas (Three Sails) on the beach of El Cabañal during the summer of 1903. One of the most luminously eloquent of his many images of the fisherwomen of his native Valencia, Las Tres Velas marks Sorolla's artistic passage to a new level of creativity. Sorolla was already one of the world's most honored painters when he launched his 1903 campaign of open-air painting among the fishing communities on Spain's Mediterranean coast, but in the course of that summer Sorolla pushed his art to a new monumentality and laid claim to a broad new palette of color effects. Lost from public view for a century, Las Tres Velas consolidates a decade of Sorolla's painting experience into an unforgettable image of the womenfolk of his beloved homeland. The asymmetry of Sorolla's eye-catching composition immediately announces the distinctive ambition of Las Tres Velas: three barefoot women of different ages, pulling together as they walk against the wind, are juxtaposed with a sweeping, open line of billowing sails on low-slung fishing skiffs that lumber into shore. Well beyond the picture's edge, the women's progress will intersect with the returning boats, but it is only the empty baskets, swinging awkwardly over the oldest woman's forearms, that connects their purpose to the distant fishing fleet. The very emptiness of the open shore spreading across the lower right corner of the painting emphasizes the unswerving advance of the fisherwomen who know their way without a glance to the boats. Wind snaps their patterned scarves and twists their aprons against their legs; the damp breeze glosses the rude wicker with prismatic color; and the early morning sunlight glances off a feature or a texture with little regard for form or beauty, yet each of the women has her own age, her own identity. One of Sorolla's most ambitious early successes with the theme of the sea La vuelta de la pesca or Bringing in the Catch (Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional) offers a telling comparison to Las Tres Velas. Virtually every Valencian motif to which Sorolla would later return -- billowing sails, brawny oxen, colorfully dressed women, dancing children, and long, streaking shadows -- is introduced in this expansive seascape of about 1897-98. Sorolla's skill at orchestrating color and in marrying complex figural groups is shown to good advantage in La vuelta de la pesca, but the painting gives little indication of the particular gifts that would soon set Sorolla well apart from the vast troupe of marine painters working throughout Europe. By 1901, once again in Valencia, Sorolla took up a subject from the right hand side of the earlier painting, creating Las Sardineras (see fig. 2), a group of women gathered around a tub of fish and the fishwife offering them for sale. Moving his figures well up in the foreground, emphasizing their huddled, pressing eagerness with a jumble of similar baskets, and weaving soft lavendar tints and and acidic green-browns into the prevailing blue and orange color scheme that pulls the women, the sea and the beach into harmony, Sorolla firmly staked a claim to a more sophisticated artistry that would bring so much grace and power to his many subsequent scenes of Valencian fishing life. Finally, in 1903 with Las Tres Velas and perhaps a dozen further seascapes, Sorolla began to make the air and wind, the water and light of Valencia, leading actors as prominent in his paintings as his fisherwomen or bathers; Sorolla's achievement as a profoundly modern master of a realism tempered by abstraction was complete. Sorolla exhibited Las Tres Velas in the Berlin international exhibition of 1904, the last time it would be seen publicly for a century (a black and white photograph in the Sorolla family archives kept the painting's existence on record). Either during the exhibition or shortly thereafter, Las Tres Velas was acquired by Max Steinthal, then one of Berlin's leading bankers. During the mid-1890s, Steinthal and his wife Fanny had built a magnificent home in Charlottenburg, a fashionable, parklike section of Berlin and throughout the first decade of the twentieth-century they built up a collection of both modern and old master paintings displayed throughout the house. Las Tres Velas can be seen hanging above Steinthal's desk in an undated family photo. Steinthal's talents as a financier were as precocious as Sorolla's as a painter: he had been a director of the Deutsche Bank since his early twenties and made an enduring mark on his native city by structuring the complex financing to build Berlin's underground and elevated railways. Steinthal continued to serve the Deutsche Bank as a director well into his eighties, until Nazi proscriptions forced him, as a Jew, to resign in 1939. Soon thereafter, the Steinthals were obliged to sell their home at 119 Uhlanstrasse. Although their sizable family of children and grandchildren escaped the worst of the Nazi persecution, Max and Fanny Steinthal chose to live out the last years of their lives in a hotel in Berlin, dying in 1940 and 1941 respectively, just before they were slated for deportation to a concentration camp. Little of their former life remained to them in those dire years, but Fanny was able to prevent the seizure of their art collection by transferring the works to one of her sons-in-law, a non-Jew, who managed to move the paintings, drawings and prints out of Berlin to Dresden. When that son-in-law, however, chose to flee East Germany following the closure of that sector after the war, he had to leave the crated Steinthal paintings behind. Seized by the GDR as property of a state enemy, the paintings were stored in the basement of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie and forgotten for fifty years. Only with the catastrophic flooding of the Elbe River during the summer of 2002 which threatened much of the artwork and apparatus stored throughout the lower reaches of the Gemäldegalerie complex did the crates come back to light. Through the provenance studies taking place at the museum, the paintings were ultimately returned to the far-flung descendants of Max and Fanny Steinthal.

More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/24130/The-Three-Sails-by-Joaquin-Sorolla-Expected-to-Sell-for-3-to-4-Million-USD-at-Sotheby-s#.UfSgRFO9z6U[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida painted Las Tres Velas (Three Sails) on the beach of El Cabañal during the summer of 1903. One of the most luminously eloquent of his many images of the fisherwomen of his native Valencia, Las Tres Velas marks Sorolla's artistic passage to a new level of creativity. Sorolla was already one of the world's most honored painters when he launched his 1903 campaign of open-air painting among the fishing communities on Spain's Mediterranean coast, but in the course of that summer Sorolla pushed his art to a new monumentality and laid claim to a broad new palette of color effects. Lost from public view for a century, Las Tres Velas consolidates a decade of Sorolla's painting experience into an unforgettable image of the womenfolk of his beloved homeland. The asymmetry of Sorolla's eye-catching composition immediately announces the distinctive ambition of Las Tres Velas: three barefoot women of different ages, pulling together as they walk against the wind, are juxtaposed with a sweeping, open line of billowing sails on low-slung fishing skiffs that lumber into shore. Well beyond the picture's edge, the women's progress will intersect with the returning boats, but it is only the empty baskets, swinging awkwardly over the oldest woman's forearms, that connects their purpose to the distant fishing fleet. The very emptiness of the open shore spreading across the lower right corner of the painting emphasizes the unswerving advance of the fisherwomen who know their way without a glance to the boats. Wind snaps their patterned scarves and twists their aprons against their legs; the damp breeze glosses the rude wicker with prismatic color; and the early morning sunlight glances off a feature or a texture with little regard for form or beauty, yet each of the women has her own age, her own identity. One of Sorolla's most ambitious early successes with the theme of the sea La vuelta de la pesca or Bringing in the Catch (Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional) offers a telling comparison to Las Tres Velas. Virtually every Valencian motif to which Sorolla would later return -- billowing sails, brawny oxen, colorfully dressed women, dancing children, and long, streaking shadows -- is introduced in this expansive seascape of about 1897-98. Sorolla's skill at orchestrating color and in marrying complex figural groups is shown to good advantage in La vuelta de la pesca, but the painting gives little indication of the particular gifts that would soon set Sorolla well apart from the vast troupe of marine painters working throughout Europe. By 1901, once again in Valencia, Sorolla took up a subject from the right hand side of the earlier painting, creating Las Sardineras (see fig. 2), a group of women gathered around a tub of fish and the fishwife offering them for sale. Moving his figures well up in the foreground, emphasizing their huddled, pressing eagerness with a jumble of similar baskets, and weaving soft lavendar tints and and acidic green-browns into the prevailing blue and orange color scheme that pulls the women, the sea and the beach into harmony, Sorolla firmly staked a claim to a more sophisticated artistry that would bring so much grace and power to his many subsequent scenes of Valencian fishing life. Finally, in 1903 with Las Tres Velas and perhaps a dozen further seascapes, Sorolla began to make the air and wind, the water and light of Valencia, leading actors as prominent in his paintings as his fisherwomen or bathers; Sorolla's achievement as a profoundly modern master of a realism tempered by abstraction was complete. Sorolla exhibited Las Tres Velas in the Berlin international exhibition of 1904, the last time it would be seen publicly for a century (a black and white photograph in the Sorolla family archives kept the painting's existence on record). Either during the exhibition or shortly thereafter, Las Tres Velas was acquired by Max Steinthal, then one of Berlin's leading bankers. During the mid-1890s, Steinthal and his wife Fanny had built a magnificent home in Charlottenburg, a fashionable, parklike section of Berlin and throughout the first decade of the twentieth-century they built up a collection of both modern and old master paintings displayed throughout the house. Las Tres Velas can be seen hanging above Steinthal's desk in an undated family photo. Steinthal's talents as a financier were as precocious as Sorolla's as a painter: he had been a director of the Deutsche Bank since his early twenties and made an enduring mark on his native city by structuring the complex financing to build Berlin's underground and elevated railways. Steinthal continued to serve the Deutsche Bank as a director well into his eighties, until Nazi proscriptions forced him, as a Jew, to resign in 1939. Soon thereafter, the Steinthals were obliged to sell their home at 119 Uhlanstrasse. Although their sizable family of children and grandchildren escaped the worst of the Nazi persecution, Max and Fanny Steinthal chose to live out the last years of their lives in a hotel in Berlin, dying in 1940 and 1941 respectively, just before they were slated for deportation to a concentration camp. Little of their former life remained to them in those dire years, but Fanny was able to prevent the seizure of their art collection by transferring the works to one of her sons-in-law, a non-Jew, who managed to move the paintings, drawings and prints out of Berlin to Dresden. When that son-in-law, however, chose to flee East Germany following the closure of that sector after the war, he had to leave the crated Steinthal paintings behind. Seized by the GDR as property of a state enemy, the paintings were stored in the basement of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie and forgotten for fifty years. Only with the catastrophic flooding of the Elbe River during the summer of 2002 which threatened much of the artwork and apparatus stored throughout the lower reaches of the Gemäldegalerie complex did the crates come back to light. Through the provenance studies taking place at the museum, the paintings were ultimately returned to the far-flung descendants of Max and Fanny Steinthal.

More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/24130/The-Three-Sails-by-Joaquin-Sorolla-Expected-to-Sell-for-3-to-4-Million-USD-at-Sotheby-s#.UfSgRFO9z6U[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org