1935 – 1988 Rome (Italy)
Like the brothers Otello and Omero, Giuseppe – his real name – took his surname from his mother Erminia, when she became sick, the very young Franco provided for her carrying out various jobs. Among these in particular at an upholsterer where he learnt the techniques of shaping and use of fabrics and cutouts; techniques that he will later use for his artistic works.
Self-taught, he began to paint in 1957, the year he left for military service; in this period through the acquaintance of the sculptor Edgardo Mannucci, he experienced Burri Informal Art, whose work fascinated him and inspired him with the works Catrami and E da una Ferita scaturì la Bellezza.
Enrolled in the PCI, in the headquarters he met both Tano Festa and Mario Schifano; he left the party following the Soviet invasion of Hungary, approaching the extra-parliamentary wing left movement.
At the end of the 1950s he exhibited for the first time in collective at the La Salita gallery in Rome, where his first solo will exhibited in the 1960s with the expression of a particular mixed technique (oil painting with gauze, bandages, nylon stockings) which he illustrated in 1962 in the short film Inquietudine directed by Mario Carbone.
Angeli works represent the violence of contemporary reality, such as Tutti Badivi i Tedeschi (O.A.S.), Cuba, 25th July; the last one in commemoration of the fall of fascism. Another source of inspiration in the 1960s was the frammenti capitolini, or symbols of an eternal Rome, both ancient such as tombstones and ruins or the Roman she- wolf, and modern ones such as the hammer and sickle or even the swastika. In those years Angeli political commitment was testified by a series of dazebao including Compagno Vietnamita, Berlino ’45, Occupazione di un monumento Equestre. After the 1968, he protested against the Vietnam War, he had a tormented relationship with Marina Ripa di Meana and maked excessive use of drugs and alcohol, joining the group of the Cursed Artists of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo. He also embraced the art of photography, mainly in black and white and in particular portraying his own circle of friends, including Tano Festa, Achille Bonito Oliva, Sandro Penna, Jannis Kounellis. He also played in a movie: Morire Gratis,1968. The art and political commitment continued with the series landscapes Dagli Appennini alle Ande, inspired by the military coup in Chile, Compagni and Vietcong and others carried out following the coup of the colonels in Greece. He got married in 1975 and the following year had a daughter, Maria. In 1978 he took part in the Venice Biennale. Afterwards his subjects were deserted squares, steeples, capitals and puppets in the form of self-portrait, a recurring theme that has been interpreted as an accompaniment to his death in Rome in 1988.
“When a person has a profound malaise he has to look for a way not to be alone anymore; Ultimately, there must be an interest that accompanies him for life „(Franco Angeli)
1925 Cavalese (Italia) – 2019 Tesero (Italia)
His life was a continuous search for that creative mystery capable of capturing an instant, an emotion, a memory, a brief or eternal moment, a word spoken with the color of the day or the evening on the canvas.
Self-taught, he learns to paint from artists he met almost by chance and through careful observation of the works of the great Italian masters. Throughout his life he often went to Florence where he was struck by the Tuscan Macchiaioli works. In that expressive technique he will refine his personal pictorial setting and at the age of 47 decided to quit the management of the family hotel to fully devote himself to painting.
During his long artistic journey, Gino mainly exhibited in Italy, collecting prizes, successes and appreciation everywhere. He was a local pictorial voice, imbued with those colors that he looked every day out of his studio windows or looked for them along the paths and country roads around Cavalese.
He often devoted himself to paint still lives, flowers, fruits, everyday objects but his sensitivity, influenced by the great French impressionists, Monet and Cézanne in the first place, was expressed best outdoors by painting meadows and trees, houses from afar, suspended horizons like his proceeding in existence, always slowly, with curiosity, trust and constancy.
Of exquisite workmanship are the portraits he painted with great artistic brightness.In the faces of elderly women and of the mother in particular, there is an invitation to slow down time and enjoy the little seeds of daily happiness without forgetting the fatigue and pain that are strewn with lived lives. Gino, with a thick and long beard, continued working until the end, he gave drawings, small paintings, traces of color on the back of new postcards to those who went to visit him, the simplicity of communication, his way to express in order to nurture and share.Many houses in Fiemme proudly save his works, his landscapes, his words. And those colors often reflect the sense of being and living that we often look for it in vain without the vitality of art.
1915 Vera de Bidasoa (Spagna) – 1979 Fiesole
Son of a journalist father, he was perpetually traveling with his family who settled in Switzerland, in Geneva in 1925. His talent revealed itself at the age of fifteen, when he was already enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts.Returned to Spain with his mother, he privately attended both painting courses and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.
In Paris, where he moved in 1937, he exhibited his works of Spanish realism and classical inspiration echoing Velazquez, Goya, Murillo; his pieces were exhibited in New York too. The following year his brother Antonio, also a painter, joined him in Paris; it was the beginning of a ten-year collaboration between the two brothers. He moved again in the 1940s, this time in Italy together with his mother and his brother Antonio. He did not expect this destination to become the family’s permanent residence. With Annigoni, Sciltian and his brother Antonio, in 1947, he formed a group called Modern Painters of Reality, in opposition to the post-impressionist criticism, proposing a „true“ art, reproducing nature as faithfully as possible.
The group went through a crisis at the end of the decade and the artistic paths of the two Bueno brothers divided too. The inclination for a politically active art was made more concrete in 1953 when Bueno adhered clearly to the art of real socialism. Equally significant of those years was the Brazilian experience of ’54, where he portrayed human figures of young farmers and children using Indian ink, motionless in a flat and unreal atmosphere; the theme was evoked between the 50s and 60s with the Children series, a symbol of oppression and degradation of the entire human race. After the trip to Brazil, Xavier Bueno technique changed and it was defined as fresco on canvas because of the use of thickening materials such as sand and collage in figurative works, after having already experimented it in still lives .
He died in 1979 at his home in Fiesole, on the hill of Florence.
„Bueno still lives deserve special attention, raised in the bottomless space where thicknesses are created by the rhythm of the objects, subtracted from a metaphysical absence.“ (Salvatore Quasimodo)
Ortona (Ch) 1892 – Milano 1989
He began his artistic training under the guidance of his father, he held his first personal exhibition in 1907 at the Milanese Artistic Family.
In the following years until the First World War – he later took part in it- he set up an exhibition in Paris at the Druet Gallery and participated in the Salon d’Automne, exhibited in Rome at the Opera House, collaborated with his father Basilio in the Great Italian Illustration with drawings and graphic works exhibiting in Milan too. After the war, in 1919, he met Carlo Carrà, who helped him relocate his personal exhibition held in Rome at the Galleria Bragaglia to the Galleria Lidel in Milan, the city where he moved permanently the following year. Here he spend time with the poet Clemente Rebora, who inspired some of his works. In the late 1920s he traveled to Italy and Paris, winning the gold medal at the International Exhibition in 1937. Back in Milan, he created the set design for the opera Margherita da Cortona, performed at the Scala.
He continuously participated in The Venice Biennale from 1928 to 1942 and he obtained his own room in 1948. Moved to Portofino at the end of the 1930s, he was inspired in later years by the enchanting Ligurian town for many of his works. In the 1950s he made about forty drawings for the Società Italiana di Ceramica of Laveno; the series is entitled l’Italia vista da Michele Cascella, it was used for the decoration of fine tableware. After the war he exhibited internationally in Paris, Buenos Aires, Montevideo and the United States where he moved for a long time, dividing his time in Italy too, particularly near Colle Val d’Elsa, in the countryside. Cascella favorite subjects were fields of wheat, poppies and flowers in general, landscapes of Abruzzo and views of Portofino.
Cascella talent as a colourist was evident from his early works, such as Primavera presso Ortona, Figure sulla Pescara, Trabocco di San Vito which are among the most modern ones of the contemporary Italian art scene. Later his production assumed a symbolist value with impressionistic experiments as in the works La Giacca Rossa and Giallo e Verde, 1918. The definition of a crepuscular landscape painter, in contrast to the excesses of an elitist intellectualism, was not underestimating and it was proof of Cascella very personal style, immune from the avant-garde pictorial currents of the 1900s. Cascella works, not only pictorial, but also including serigraphs, etchings, lithographs and chromolithographs, are exhibited in the most prestigious museums in Italy and abroad; among these the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Brussels and the gallery of the University of Santa Clara in California. His portraits of women are also of considerable importance, made with refined pre-futurism techniques.
„When Michele Cascella decided to become an artist, his father Basilio, while showing him colors and brushes, told him that he would learn what painting was the day he was able to paint the air. Michele never forgot it, he always tried to achieve that goal. When he succeeded, as a good individualist, he did not tell anyone. His satisfaction, intimate, never exhibited was enough for him. I continue to take care of Michele Cascella so that his art continues to live. “ (da Saper dipingere l’aria, by Pier Paolo Cimatti).
„Reviled in life for being too indulgent towards popularity, because too ‚commercial‘, as they used to say, Cascella is now taking his revenge. Nineteen years after his death would have been enough to wipe him not only from critics minds but also from the public ones. But here he is again among us, still dealing with him. His intentionally simple art, devoted to identify an instinctive idea of beauty, as shareable as possible, almost Franciscan in conceiving the meaning of nature, a sermo communis where a marina is always a marina and a flower a flower. “ (Vittorio Sgarbi)
Egna (Bz) 1950
Self – taught artist, the passion for painting and figurative arts led him to dedicate himself to art professionally. Costazza most used technique is the oil painting, but he experiments the watercolor, crayon and charcoal too.
His landscapes reveal his personal artistic idea to synthesize the elements, mountains, houses, people, animals with “unicum” real but magical, timeless and almost metaphysical; the human figures blend with the landscape becoming integral part.
Costazza essential nature, without frills, make the artist technique and subjects recognizable. The silent and, sometimes, brusque expressivity that the artist instill in his simple figures and animals is identifiable.
His works have been exhibited both in solo and collective exhibitions in many galleries in Trentino-Alto Adige, in other Italian cities like Milan and Padua and abroad, in Austria, Innsbruck and Vienna.
Fondo (Tn) 1892 – Rovereto (Tn) 1960
The multifaceted artist – painter, sculptor, set designer, illustrator, designer and costume designer – was born in Fondo in Val di Non (Tn) in 1892. He moved to Rovereto with his family, he attended the art institute of the Elisabettina Royal School, creator of many artists who were the protagonists of the Italian twentieth century.
After an unsuccessful attempt to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he worked as a decorator at the Turin International Exhibition in 1910; he went back to Rovereto and, very attracted to sculpture, he worked for a local marble worker, acquiring those skills that will be later present in his “solid” and “volumetric” painting.
In 1913 he published the book of drawings, poems and thoughts Spezzature and the following year he exhibited in Rome, where he met the futurists Balla and Marinetti. He became Balla pupil, he wrote the manifesto Ricostruzione Futurista dell’Universo with them and then pursued research aimed at clarifying the relationship between Futurism and contemporary artistic currents.
In 1915 Depero left for war, participating in the irredentist movement, but, when he fell ill, he was discharged; His ink works about war date back to this period, among these Il Mitragliere.Returned to Rome, in addition to painting, he devoted himself to the composition of „foley“ songs, the seed of the „radio lyrics“ of the following decade. In the meantime he met Picasso, helping him in the creation of costumes, and the poet Clavel, for whom he illustrated the book Un Istituto per Suicidi with futurist / expressionist drawings; always in collaboration with Clavel he produced the puppet theater Balli Plastici, progressive because of the actors absence and for the music, composed by Bartok and Malipiero. He started to make his futurist tapestries of colored fabrics bringing the theatrical experience into his art, defining his very personal style, recognizable by the constant presence of puppets and robots in painting too.Since 1918, he wanted the Futurist idea to reach people, he abandoned the utopia of a Futurist reconstruction – his works were relegated to museums – to devote himself to applied art, inspiring the birth of the Futurist Houses of Art; the following year he opened his own one in Rovereto, producing furniture, advertising posters and furnishing accessories.
In the 1920s he devoted himself to advertising, making posters and tapestries; participated in various exhibitions and created the first Futurist Waistcoats, which are worn by the protagonists of the movement. In 1927 he began his collaboration with the Campari firm, he had dedicated it the painting Squisito al Selz; published the monograph Depero Futurista, also known as the Libro Imbullonato. His particular point of view about advertising art will be summarized in the Manifesto dell’Arte Pubblicitaria.
In 1928 Depero moved with his wife to New York, where he opened the Depero Futurist House; in addition to exhibiting his works, he worked in advertising, for the theater, for public places and created covers for the most important magazines such as The New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair.
In 1930 Depero came back to Italy, where he compared the new course of the Futurist current, Aeropainting; he was not fascinated at all because he was a pragmatic artist and stopped participating in the aerial-futurist manifestations. Even though he totally left the new current, he became a refeference figure for his original ideas. He worked intensively in the advertising field for important industrial, commercial and political clients; he rediscovered his eccentricity by making objects using Buxus, a substitute for wood, during the autarchic period of fascism, supporting the political movement for job opportunities only.
His Autobiography was published in 1940 and after that he moved to Serrada di Folgaria (Tn), suspended the experience of his Art House; in 1947 he returned to the USA, where, however, Futurism was frowned upon as being considered fascist art.
He went back to his homeland in 1949 and, despite being disappointed, continued to work, published a manifesto on Nuclear Art, decorated and furnished the council chamber of the Autonomous Province of Trento, published the Antibiennale and in 1957 began to set up the Depero Museum Gallery in Rovereto ; the gallery opened the year before his death.
Since the 1970s, Depero work was rejected because considered as pro-fascist and because of belonging to a minor current of Futurism. In the following years his art was reconsidered and re-evaluated so much so that now the Mart of Rovereto has reopened the House of Arte Futurista Depero as a museum and collected the artist archive in his own Archive of the‘ 900.
1904 Khorkom (Armenia turca) – 1948 Sherman (Connecticut)
Born in Armenia during the Ottoman domination, he reunited with his father in 1920- who had already emigrated to the USA in 1908 to avoid military service -. His mother had already died of starvation the year before in Yerevan because of the Armenian genocide that began in 1915.
In order to recreate his identity, he changed his original name (VostanikManougAdoian) to Arshile Gorky, pretending to be a Georgian noble and distant relative of the Russian Maxim Gorky.
In the early 1920s he attended the „New School of Design“ in Boston where he had his first experience as a part-time teacher; at a later time and for more than 5 years, he taught at the „Grand Central School of Art“ in New York, founded in 1923 by Edmund Greacen. Initially influenced by Impressionism, he later painted post-impressionist paintings to get into surrealism going through cubist experiences too.Acclaimed as one of the most important American painters of the twentieth century, he had a fundamental influence on the current of Abstract Expressionism. Among Gorky’s artistic connections there are those with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Koonig. In 1940 Andrè Breton, after seeing his most recent paintings , especially „TherLiverIs the Cock’sComb“, which he declared to be one of the most important paintings ever produced in America, defined the artist as surrealist. Private life: two daughters born of the marriage. Since 1946, Gorky had some misfortunes and a series of crises: his studio burned down, he underwent a colostomy, his wife had an affair with the Chilean architect and painter Roberto Matta, he broke his neck and the arm that he used to paint with was paralyzed during a car accident. His wife left him taking their daughters with her.At the age of 44, in 1948, the painter hanged himself in Sherman, Connecticut, where he is buried.
“The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist’s brush.” (Arshile Gorky)
1891 Roma – 1984 Venezia
His passion for geometry and drawing led him at a young age to attend both courses of the Technical Institute and those held at the Free School of Painting in Rome.
In 1908 he abandoned the Technical Institute, he learned the painting practice at the workshop of the Capranesi decorator where he remained for almost three years as his first assistant.
He then enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts, in Rome, also studying on his own the great Italian masters including Giotto, Correggio, Piero della Francesca and the French Courbet and Chardin. The beginning of a reflection on the importance of light in his paintings dates back to this period.
In 1913 he exhibited his first paintings and won the Lana academic competition.
The following year he had the opportunity to examine Matisse and Cezanne artworks; he especially studied the Cezanne shape-color.
For economic reasons, in 1916 he worked for a couple of years as a draftsman at the engineering department of Rome.
His most important figurative works dates back to the early twenties; in 1922 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale and began to have a certain commercial success. His Tram, now exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, achieved resounding success at the Biennale in 1924.
In 1927 he married the sculptor Adriana Bernardi and taught painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice where he took part again in the Biennale and in 1928 and presented his important text La Giudecca.
He continued to write and publish thoughts on his pictorial research, exhibited in Florence and again at the Venice Biennale which he left for Bologna in 1935 where he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts.
His first monograph was published in New York and the Bulletin of Art in Bologna in 1937. In this period he elaborated the anti-naturalist symbolism of synthesism.
During the Second World War he began to compose poem verses which he will publish only at the end of the 1950s and he did not stop to write about art; in the postwar period he also dedicated himself to graphics with a series of lithographs.
He exhibited again at the Venice Biennale where he now has a personal room, participated in the spatial movement of Lucio Fontana and in the Twentieth-Century Italian Art.
The thematic cycles, which have always been the basis of Guidi painting research, were recurring during the 1950s and early 1960s: Angoscia, Figure nello spazio, Marine,Teste, Marine,Architetture umane, Riflessioni del tempo, Tumulti, Architetture Cosmiche. Later, other cycles will be dedicated to the all’Albero, Figure Agitate, Figure Inquiete, Branco da branco, l’Uomo e il Cielo.
In the field of poetry he published the collection La Ragione di Essere in 1967, l’Età Improbabile in 1979 and, in collaboration with the painter Roberto Colombo, Shambariben.
Venice celebrated him at the Cini Foundation for his ninety years, he was still very active until his death which happened during an exhibition of his latest works at the Il Traghetto Gallery.
His remains rest in the monumental cemetery of San Michele, an island in the Venetian lagoon.
1881 Argentan (Francia) – 1955 Gif-sur-Yvette (Francia)
Born in Lower Normandy, he studied architecture before moving to Paris in 1900, supporting himself working as a technical designer. After his military service he tried to enter, but without success, the Academy of Fine Arts; then he enrolled in the School of Figurative Arts.
Before starting to work seriously as a painter at the age of 25, he attended the Academy as a private practitioner for 3 years defining this time as „empty and useless years“. At the time his works were influenced by Impressionism, for example the painting Il Giardino di Mia Madre, it is one of the rare ones from that period which he did not destroy.
His following works, especially drawings, put the emphasis on geometric shapes, for example the painting Nudi Nella Foresta, demonstrating a personal form of cubism, later defined by the critics Tubismo due to the frequent use of circular shapes. Gradually the works take on more and more abstract forms through the use of colors in addition to white, black and green.
Legèr work was influenced by his personal experience during the great war, throughout he made numerous sketches of armaments, airplanes, fellow soldiers in the trenches; of this period Soldato con una Pipa e I Giocatori di Carte.
After the First World War the „return to order“ , felt in the arts too, led Legér to paint figures and animals harmoniously inserted in the landscape, inspired by the works of Rousseau who he had known in 1909. These works also refer to Purism, the rational style founded by Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, which makes adjustments to Cubist impulsiveness; representative of this style Il Sifone of 1924, a still life inspired by a Campari advertisement.
Attracted by the cinema, Legér devoted himself to this art, taking into consideration the abandonment of painting; in 1924 he produced and directed the iconic and futuristic Balletto Meccanico.
Later in 1925, influenced by the theories of Le Corbusier, he created the first of his “murals”, abstract zones of flat colors that seem to recede or advance.
In the early 1930s, organic and irregular shapes take on more and more importance in Legér work, as in The Two Sisters of 1935 and in the various versions of Adamo e Eva.
During the Second World War Legér lived in the United States, teaching at Yale and painting works inspired by the superimposition of natural and mechanical elements (The Tree in the Ladder, Romantic Landscape, Three Musicians).
After his American stay, he came back to France in 1945, joined the Communist Party and partly stopped abstraction, painting figures of divers, bricklayers, acrobats and outings to the countryside. In the years before his death he taught in Bern, designed mosaics, glass windows and painted the series The Great Parade.
He died at his home in 1955.
„Abstract art appeared as a complete revelation, so we were able to consider that human figure’s value is no longer sentimental, but plastic”
1967 Trento
Lome is the stage name of Lorenzo Menguzzato. He was born in Trento where he still lives and works. He also is the founder and curator of the Bosco dei Poeti, an artistic project in Dolcè, Province of Verona.
In 1983 he attended the International School of Graphics in Venice with Riccardo Licata; he graduated at the local Academy of Fine Arts, he used to be a student of the painting course held by Emilio Vedova; the thesis presented was about Giulio Turcato.
In 1989 the Municipality of Trento awarded him a scholarship to attend the workshop of the engraver and printer Giorgio Upiglio in Milan.
In 1996 he won La Colomba prize in Venice and the A. Volpi contemporary art prize in Pisa.
He takes part in countless exhibitions, both in Italy and abroad, including in Trentino Alto Adige at the Palazzo delle Albere and at the Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art both located in Trento, at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MART) in Trento and Rovereto, at the Diocesan Museum and at the Palazzo Libera in Villa Lagarina, at the Museum of Modern Art and at Castel Mareccio in Bolzano.
Outside the region he exhibited at the Casabianca Museum in Malo, in the Province of Vicenza, at the Parisi Valle Museum in Maccagno, in the Province of Varese, at the Museum of Modern Art in Gazoldo degli Ippoliti, in the Province of Mantua, at the Fortezza da Basso in Florence.
Among the exhibitions abroad we remind the ones in Austria, Salzburg (personal at the Traklhaus) and Klagenfurt (StigtViktring), in Portugal, Coimbra (Museu da CienciaUniversidade de Coimbra), in Spain, Santiago de Compostela (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea) and overseas Toronto (Museum of Ornamental Post).
He created several Object Books in collaboration with the art critic and poet Luigi Serravalli and the poet Alda Merini,
In 2005 he won the Telecom Italia Contagiare Bellezza Award handed over by the President Umberto Eco.
1886 Trento – 1919 Roma
Moggioli, solitary and thoughtful, devoted himself in this period to landscape painting. Later he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1909; he made together with other artists the decoration of various panels in the Castle Gardens on Burano island. He moved with his wife to the island in 1911 where he met various painters such as Rossi, Casorati and the critic and director of Ca ‚Pesaro Barbantini.
Some of his paintings of this period were evaluated masterpieces, such as The Il ponte verde ,1911, Cipresso Gemello,1912 and Primavera a Mazzorbo ,1913.
In 1912 he exhibited with a solo show in Ca ‚Pesaro and in the following years in Rome.
He had deep friendship with Cesare Battisti, he followed him enlisting as a volunteer in the Legion of Trentino in 1915; he was assigned to the cartographic department on the Vallagarina front because of his ability as a draftsman. The following year he was reformed struck by a serious illness,
During his convalescence he resumed painting, portraying the hills of Garda lake and its surroundings, influenced by his fellows painters Garbari and Rossi.
At the end of 1916 he moved again, this time to Rome, settling in an atelier at Villa Strohl. He started to work with Antonio Rizzi making cartoons for the mosaics of the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele.
Moggioli’s artistic activity was very intense and varied: the colors are lighter and brighter and he prefers subjects such as figures, interiors and landscapes with almost devoid of horizon.
Affected by the infamous Spanish flu, he died at the young age of thirty-two in Rome, on January 26, 1919.
Venice celebrated him the same year of his death with the exhibition of his works at the Accademia and with a solo show at Ca ‚Pesaro; a large retrospective was dedicated to him at the Venice Biennale in 1920.
The Mart of Rovereto displays some of his works on the permanent exhibition.
1915 – 2013 Soraga (TN)
In the valley he was known as “IgiPitor”, a free spirit and an impressionist soul with the easel on his shoulder, a tireless traveler and a dreamer in his own way, like all dreamers, the tightrope walkers and the magicians.
Born in Soraga, at that period Austrian land – as he liked to remember – and grew up among mountain fields and meadows. In almost 100 years Igi experienced numerous historical and social changes that radically transformed its cultural and artistic habitat, living and facing the full and empty of life and existence.
„There are 3 colors – he said – everything else is all a kaleidoscope“ and laughing he would go back to his escapes to Venice or to Fuciade with his friend Sergio, or around Italy and Europe to exhibit, or strolling around on his Lambretta with his colors and his canvases.
Anyone who has known the Man Beyond the Artist knows that Igi had two different ways of expressing his works, one of utility such as landscape painting, the other, the most accurate , that came from the heart that loved and from the mind that dreamed supported by a clear, fascinating and joyful thought.
In his artistic career he produced over 5,000 works, mostly Dolomites landscapes but also sea and gondolas, portraits, still lives and more.
And today, in the houses of Fassa and beyond, his works recall the colors of freshness, of living and being outdoors was a choice made beyond all reason and all evil, like a game, a gift or a song free.
In the end Igi passed away singing after greeting everyone in his own way, as always, as he used to do. After all, the colors are still 3 and the everything else is more than ever a kaleidoscope.
1919 Malles Venosta (Bz) – 1986 Milano
South Tyrolean father and Austrian mother, he was the youngest of ten siblings of a very poor family. His father, a tinsmith, died when Karl was only four years old.
After completing the mandatory schooling, he painted in his spare time after work, he used to work ashandyman for a house painter in Malles; he later moved to a varnisher in Bressanone, where he met the Austrian painter and restorer Fasal with whom he will work for later. He learned the secrets of the fresco and technically improved in painting.
Called up for military service to fight for Italy in the Second World War, however, he obtained his leave opting for German citizenship soon; before leaving for Germany he was commissioned several paintings of farmsteads, which their owners would have brought with them to Germany as they chose to move to that country.
He enrolled at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, which he was unable to attend, however, when he was called up for military service for the German army; in 1943 he got leave for study reasons and for a semester he managed to be in Berlin at the Academy.
At the end of the war he came back to his valley and organized his first personal exhibition in 1946.
He then attended the Academies of Florence and later the Brera in Milan.
At the end of the 1940s he spent a whole year in Paris where he studied with the painter and illustrator André Lothe.
He then returns to Italy in Florence, Milan and South-Tyrol, where he frescoes various churches, including those of Prato allo Stelvio and Malles.
Returned to Paris in 1950, he met his future wife Marie Joseph and carried out the preparatory work for the war memorial in Naturno and Malles. The work is damaged by unknown people and then hidden by the intervention of the Church, which did not like the work, it will be restored not before 1968.
He moved to Brazil for a while where he exhibited in São Paulo and where his eldest daughter was born. In 1955 he returned to Bolzano to paint the frescoes in the Provincial Council Chamber; for the next three years he returned to Brazil and then organized exhibitions and created a fresco in the headquarters of the Folha da Manha newspaper.
He permanently returned to Europe in 1958, he worked in South Tyrol, France and Austria. He exhibited unsuccessfully in Milan in 1963 and then created the demanding cycle of frescoes in the Chapel of the Ponte Europa, the impressive Austrian viaduct over the Wipptal, between Brenner and Innsbruck.
In 1976 he was awarded the Medal for Sciences and Arts conferred on him by Austria.
In 1978 he moved again with his family to Paris and then, due to his illness, to the south of France for treatments. In the small village of Cipières he spend the rest of his life except for short intervals in Paris, in his valley in Burgusio and Milan, where he died on December 8, 1986.
1957 Alma Ata (Kazakistan)
He completed his first art studies in Abay, in the Karagandy district, at the local Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Pedagogical Institute.
He did not participate in any exhibitions and he did not join the Union of Artists until the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991,
At the end of the 1980s he contributed to the decoration of the museum dedicated to Nikolay Rerih, Russian painter, writer and archaeologist in Ujmon, in the basin of the Altai Mountains of the same name.
The first exhibitions in which he took part date back to the years between ’95 and ’97, guest of the galleries under the direction of the Kosteevo Museum of Republican Art, called „Parades of Kazakhstan“.
He was co-protagonist at the international exhibition La Canzone del Coachman in the capital Alma Ata in 1998.
In the meantime he moved to Lipestk in Russia where he will inaugurate his first solo exhibition entitled Arte Non Venale ; paintings and compositions of various kinds are exhibited in his own apartment.
Between 2002 and 2005 participated in various competitive exhibitions titled Artist-Teacher obtaining several awards.
Today his artistic production continues together with his career as a teacher at an institute in Lipetsk.
Several private collections in Russia, Kazakhstan, Italy and Germany display his works.
1902 – 1984 Bologna
He was born in Bologna where he exhibited for the first time at the age of 25 after graduating at the local Academy of Fine Arts; the exhibition is organized by the Francesco Francia Promoting Society for Fine Arts. He will be admitted to the Venice Biennale and to 14 other editions one year after his first solo exhibition.
He won the Baruzzi Prize In 1929 and the following year was called to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice thanks to his fame due to the participation in the Barcelona International Exhibition; in the early 1950s he also took over the direction of the Academy.
Defined as the fresco master thanks to his extraordinary technique, Saetti created the Holy Family at the University of Padua in 1958 and the Colloquio con l’angelo, frescoed on canvas at the Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna in 1974.
Saetti made important wall frescoes in sacred buildings such as Sant’Eugenio in Rome and Santa Maria delle Grazie in Bologna; elsewhere he used the technique of fresco on canvas, for example the Madre veneziana, work of 1937, exhibited at the Municipal Art Gallery Modern in Rome.
In 1970 the Japanese government invited him to participate, as an esteemed fresco specialist, in the conference held at the University of Tokyo.
Saetti also ranges to other branches of graphics such as drawings, engravings, lithographs and also engages in glass decoration and in the creation of mosaics.
As a painter of sacred art he participated in various exhibitions and he performed a mosaic relief in glass paste in Florence, in the church of San Giovanni Battista in 1961 .
1971 is the date of the publication of his monograph by Giuseppe Marchiori.
He took part in major international exhibitions that the Venice Biennale organized in the capitals of Eastern Europe and Vienna. His anthological exhibitions were shown in Venice in 1975 and in Florence in 1979; a new anthology was organized by Palazzo Strozzi in Florence after his death.
The main Italian museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna (Mambo) and the Museo Novecento in Florence, display his works which were also exhibited in important museums abroad.
Important anthological exhibitions dedicated to Saetti graphic production were organized at the Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna in the years 1974 and 1981; large mosaics were exhibited at the Palazzo Pretorio in Prato in 1981.
A tribute was given to him by Galleria 56 in Bologna on the occasion of the centenary of his birth in 2002; between 2004 and 2004 Rossana Bossaglia edited the anthology Bruno Saetti 1902-1984. Tra intimismo e sublimazione.
Saetti painted female nudes, motherhood, landscapes, not neglecting symbolism, for example by painting figures of angels. The severe compositional rigour was the basis of an expressionist realism that avoids the artistic avant-gardes.
He died in 1984 at the age of 82.
Homs (Libia) 1934 – Roma 1998
He was born in Homs, once a city of the Italian Libya, where his father was an employee of the Ministry of Education.
Versatile artist, more than a painter, he was also a director, actor and rock musician. Exuberant and prolific, he was called a cursed artist due to his addiction to drugs.
At the end of the 1950s he took part in the artistic movement of the School of Piazza del Popolo together with Franco Angeli and Tano Festa; the group of artists used to meet in a well-known bar in Rome, the Caffè Rosati located in Piazza del Popolo. Some of the intellectuals who spend time in this place are the writers Pasolini, Moravia and the director Fellini.
His first personal exhibition was held at the Galleria Appia Antica in Rome in 1959. Since then Schifano has stood out in the world cultural scene thanks to an intense artistic production.
In Rome the group exhibited in the 1960s at the La Salita Gallery and the following year Schifano exhibited alone at the La Tartaruga Gallery.
On his first trip to New York he met Andy Warhol, attended his Factory and participated actively in the events promoted by the New American Cinema Group.
Following this journey, he was invited to participate in the New Realists exhibition together with Roy Lichtenstein, Warhole and other emerging artists of Pop Art and New Realism.
Returning from New York, he participated in exhibitions in Paris, Milan and Rome; it was hosted at the XXXII International Art Exhibition in 1964. The paintings Anemic Landscapes and the first 16 mm films Round Trip and Reflex are from this period and because of them he distinguished himself as a prominent figure in Italian experimental cinema.
In Rome, he met the poet Ungaretti, the director Ferreri and Ettore Rosboch with whom he shared his passion for music; the two friends often went to London, where they met the Rolling Stones. Their Monkey Man piece of 1969 was dedicated to Schifano.
After taking part in the Biennale of San Marino and San Paolo in Brazil in 1965, he devoted himself to cinema, collaborating with Marco Ferreri for L’Harem in 1967. Thanks to Ferreri, Schifano produced the Trilogia per un massacre composed from the three feature films Satellite (1968), Umano non umano (1969), and Trapianto, Consunzione, Morte di Franco Brocani (1969).
Achille Bonito Oliva, in the Vitality of the negative in Italian art 1960/70 exhibition of 1971, displayed some paintings by Schifano. Influenced by North American artists such as Jasper Johns he used numbers and letters as individual elements in his works.
Mario Schifano was also well known for the Propagande series, dedicated to the Coca-Cola and Esso brands; ; i Paesaggi anemici, le Vedute interrotte, L’albero della vita e i Campi di grano are clear examples of Pop Art.
The passion for photography encouraged him to create mixed works, emulsified canvases, photographic images on which he intervened with painting in a non-invasive way.
Schifano was a pioneer in the use of technology for his artistic production; he was among the first ones to use the computer, processing the images on emulsified canvases (computerized canvases).
A very prolific author of apparently simple works, he is always been targeting by counterfeiters, especially after his death from a heart attack at the age of 64.
1925 Mezzano di Primiero (Italia) – 2004 Casez (Italia)
Born as Riccardo Antonio Svaizer, his first works were frescoes painted at the age of 11 and still visible today. Before enrolling in the Carmini Art Institute in Venice in 1945, he attended courses at the Technical Institute of Belluno.
In the early 1950s, he moved to the Côte d’Azur to meet Picasso, Chagall, Legér, Le Corbusier, Cocteau and the poet Paul Eluard.
Back to Italy and after graduating at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, he taught for a short period in Trentino but gave up after a month because he was called by Bruno Saetti who wanted him as assistant at the Academy; he taught painting and became part of the avant-garde of the Venetian cultural environment together with Maderna, Nono, Stravinskij, Vittorini, Quasimodo, De Pisis and many others.
In 1960 he left the Academy of Venice to settle in the French Riviera and to devote himself to the ceramics.The first mural works were born in the following years, including Apoteosi della Tecnica for the Publishing Institute of Milan and acrylic panels and frescoes for two hotels in San Martino di Castrozza.
After the wedding in 1963 and the birth of his daughters Barbara and Monica, a fruitful collaboration began with the Ceramica Pagnossin company in Treviso until the second half of the 1970s, inaugurated with the low relief for the Levico thermal baths
In 1978 he realized the concept of total art (architecture-painting) with the interior design of the Da Silvio restaurant in San Michele all’Adige: from the decorative panels on the walls, to the lighting bodies, to various devices and tools such as soapstones for cooking at the table. The restaurant is nowadays cultural heritage of Trentino. The previous year he had created a large panel for the meeting room of the Agricultural Institute. In the 1980s, the versatile artist carried out projects of various kinds, including the 3 facades of the town hall of Carrosnel in the canton of Nice, where he experimented with a new technique based on oxides and concrete.
Schweizer received numerous prizes and recognitions, including the victory in the international competition for the decorations at Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes in 1982, the gold medal at the 10th Biennale, the Murano Award, the Cavalierato della Repubblica awarded in 2001, as well as membership with the prestigious Academies of the Agiati and the Accesi in Trentino. He died in September 2004 in Casez, in Val di Non.
“It would not be exact, indeed limiting, to pigeonhole you only within the painting sector. In this aspect of your work you could be defined as an artist-painter as the French say; as indeed I believe it is when it comes to people of genuine talent“
Testimony of Bruno Saetti, from Riccardo Schweizer, “Artisti Italiani” series, Nuovi Sentieri Editore.
Giovanni Segantini Arco (Tn) 1858 – Monte Schafberg (Grigioni) 1899
He was an Italian painter, one of the greatest exponents of Divisionism, he was born into a poor family in Arco which was under Austrian domination at the time.
At the age of 7 years old, since the mother was dead, he was entrusted to his half-sister in Milan. Without a real family, he lived a vagabond life that will lead him to be arrested and locked up in a reformatory in 1870, where he remained for three years. He was later entrusted to his half-brother, Napoleone , he worked for him as a shop boy in his shop in Borgo Valsugana (Tn); he always loved painting and it was artistically talented, he came back to Milan in 1874 where he attended the evening courses at the Academy of Fine arts Of Brera for three years. Thanks to the income from his work in an a workshop and from teaching drawing, he then succeeded in attending regular courses in Brera for two years, making friends with local artists including the painter Emilio Longoni and the writer Carlo Morenzi; he exhibited in Brera and, noticed by critics, he obtained his first recognitions.
Among his early works, influenced by Lombard realism, stand out the Milano views Il Naviglio a Ponte San Marco and Il Coro della Chiesa di Sant’Antonio. He moved to Brianza in 1881 in order to work with the support of Vittore Grubicy who had met years earlier in Milan; collaborated with Longoni and developed original and very personal expressive forms. The works of this period are of peasant inspiration and Brianza views; the first masterpieces were born, such as La Raccolta dei Bozzoli (1882), Zampognari in Brianza (1883) A Messa Prima (1885). He received the first International prize winning the gold medal in Amsterdam for Ave Maria a Trasbordo and Anversa per La Tosatura delle Pecore; the definitive success of this Naturalist period came with the composition Alla Stanga (1885), that is displayed today at National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.
In 1894 the painter moved from Savognin to Maloja near St. Moritz, in the Upper Engadine, in search of a solitary and mystical life. Here, inspired by the majestic Alpine landscape, he conceived the ambitious project for a triptych for the Engadine pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900; the work realization was too expensive and he did not receive economic support from the valley’s hotelier, this was why ,the work, resized, became the famous Trittico della Natura, exhibited in the Italian pavilion. At the age of 41, in 1899, the painter died of a sudden attack of peritonitis, while he was painting on the Schafberg mountain, near Pontresina.
1924 Ortisei (BZ)
Child of artists, the father was an iron sculptor and the mother was daughter of the well-known painter Josef Moroder Lusenberg. Since childhood he reveals his natural talent for drawing and painting.
After his studies and apprenticeship in a workshop, he opened his sculpture studio in Ortisei in the 1950s and after 20 years of hard work he began to attract the attention of art critics who soon led him to exhibit his works in the most important galleries and museums around the world.
There has been publications, prizes, films, fame that has never influenced either the freedom or the highly personal creativity of the Artist, of the Man, of the Maestro Vallazza.
One day the fear knocked on the door. The courage went to open. There was nobody.
It was the dusty workshop door of Adolf Vallazza, big hands, deep eyes, enthusiasm and passion, a boyish face forever.
In the beginning it was not easy for him to abandon the traditional sculpture to devote himself to new things, never seen in Val Gardena, a place closed to the artistic avant-gardes anchored to the sacred, ludic and tourist art.
Adolf chose the courage, he traced his drawings which then became sculptures and soon he filled houses, churches, theaters and public places with enormous plastic figures that looked to the future, works of art to express depth and incandescence of being and existing everywhere and forever, in every place and in every time.
He was the first one to recover the beams and boards of old and disused farmsteads in order to give them new shape and new life.
He invented his personal style composing extraordinary dynamic figures, he did not choose the dimensions but the quality of conservation and life of the woods that matured over hundreds of years in the stables, barns and houses of the Val Gardena.
Adolf observed the woods for a long time, placed them where he could see and look at them, then he drew, then sculpted, cut, carved, watercolored and finally, like a happy child, he assembled, jointed, joined, tightly, with grace, patience, creativity and harmony.
Until a few years ago Adolf used to go daily to his shop to work, enjoy himself – he said – „an artist gives everything he is and has, he does what he feels to do, first of all an artist is and remains a generous man „.
Now at the age of 97 he spends his days in his home in Ortisei among his fondest memories.
Every day he meets Someone, every day he looks at his path that is made essentially of harmony, beauty and closeness.
His works speak to him from every corner of the world and he listens to them, answers and smiles because he knows that whoever welcomes a thought does not receive something, but Someone. Every time, all the time, always.
1907 Brunico (Bz) – 1999 Trento
His father abandoned him when he was a little child, to seek fortune in the Usa, entrusting him to the orphanage in Bressanone, not far from Brunico where he was born; both villages and the current Trentino-Alto Adige region were under the Habsburg domination.
At the age of 19 years old he moved to Ortisei, in Val Gardena, where he attended the local professional school. The director of the school, prof. Sella, appreciated the sculptures of the young pupil.
At the end of his studies he moved to Emil Demetz, a sculptor friend who lived in Acqui, in Piedmont in 1928. Thanks to the friendship with Demetz, after a couple of years, he found the opportunity to move to the capital, where he exhibited for the first time. Following a very positive review in the magazine “Oggi e Domani”, Mussolini also visited the exhibition. Impressed by Winkler’s works, the Duce bought one of his works and summoned the sculptor to Palazzo Venezia commissioning his own portrait, a wooden sculpture in 1932.
During the same year, following a meeting at the German embassy in Rome, the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels invited him to Berlin. Five years later he went to Oslo, where he met the painter Edvard Munch.
Before the beginning of the Second World War he came back to Italy, where he decided to stay, teaching in 1943 for a short period in Ortisei; he will be fired because of his unfitting personality. After that he went to Trento because he found a job at the local department of Fine Arts.
He moved to Trentino to work at the department of Fine Arts in Trento, where he made his first Via Crucis for the church of San Udalrico in Lavis; here he also worked as an interpreter, an activity that would have brought him to Montecassino, but he decided to escape to Val di Rabbi. Here he carved wooden altars; sacred wooden art was also the recurring theme of his work, including many Via Crucis. The church of Santa Maria Bambini in the Institute of the same name in Trento has perhaps the most famous of these.
Once abandoned the sacred wooden art for the bronze sculpture of a profane theme, in the second 50s and early 60s he created various works including the cycle of bronzes on I lavori fondamentali dell’Uomo in Bolzano, the monument to Padre Haspinger in San Martino in Casies, the war memorial Caduti in Bressanone. The cemetery of Trento, on the other hand,has two of his works in marble: Cesare Battisti and Alcide Degasperi busts.
During the years of the 1968 protest, he made hundreds of sketches of the protagonists, the students of the newborn faculty of Sociology in Trento. In the same period, his graphic works were also inspired by the figure of Michael Gaismair, leader of the peasants wars of the 1500s.
In Strasbourg, at the seat of the European parliament, the history of the Trentino people was exhibited in 1994. Later the same exhibition was inaugurated in the presence of the Archduke Otto of Habsburg in Arco (Tn).
The bronze work of San Francesco straziato was a gift made by the artist to the city of Assisi struck by the earthquake in 1998.
Othmar Winkler died in Trento the following year but was buried in the small cemetery in Velturno (Bz), his adopted hometown, where used to live his mother.
The art is not only pieces. It is essential for any choices, it is in the air you breath, every day, at the Art Hotel.
In addition to the authors of the Art hotel whoserooms are dedicated, there are many other artists who give prestige to the Locanda.
Feliciano Costa “Parolot”, sculptor from Moena. The logo of our Art hotel was born from one of his wooden sculptures.
Luigi Pederiva, a painter from Fassa Valley and a great family friend, a room is dedicated to him,but here he is mentioned because the name of his house in Soraga „Locanda degli Artisti“ has become the name of our house. Jacopo Mazzonelli, Simone Turra and Matthias Sieff, sculptors from Trentino whose works characterize the facade of the Art hotel and enrich the interior rooms.
Alberto Detomas “Albo”, a painter from Fassa Valley whose painting stands out on the main facade. He also paid homage to Depero in the room dedicated to the futurist from Trentino.
Via Roma, 23 | Canazei | Trentino | Dolomiti | Italia
Tel. +39 0462 888023 | Cell. +39 340 4775508 | Email: info@locandadegliartisti.art
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