Michele Cascella

Michele Cascella

He began his artistic training under the guidance of his father, and held his first solo exhibition in 1907 at the Milanese Artistic Family.

In the following years, up to the First World War – in which he later took part – he set up an exhibition in Paris at the Druet Gallery and participated in the Salon d’Automne. He also exhibited in Rome at the Opera House and collaborated with his father Basilio on the Great Italian Illustration with drawings and graphic works, also exhibiting in Milan.

After the war, in 1919, he met Carlo Carrà, who helped him move his solo exhibition held in Rome at the Galleria Bragaglia to the Galleria Lidel in Milan, the city where he settled permanently the following year. Here he spent time with the poet Clemente Rebora, who inspired some of his works.

In the late 1920s he travelled throughout Italy and to 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 La Scala.

He participated continuously in the Venice Biennale from 1928 to 1942, and in 1948 he was given his own personal room.

Having moved to Portofino at the end of the 1930s, he later drew inspiration from the enchanting Ligurian town for many of his works.

In the 1950s he created around forty drawings for the Società Italiana di Ceramica of Laveno. The series, entitled L’Italia vista da Michele Cascella, 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 lived for a long period, alternating with stays in Italy, particularly in the countryside near Colle Val d’Elsa.

Cascella’s talent as a colourist was evident from his early works, such as Primavera presso Ortona, Figure sulla Pescara, and Trabocco di San Vito, among the most modern of the contemporary Italian art scene.

Later, his production took on a symbolist character, with impressionistic experimentation, as seen in the works La Giacca Rossa and Giallo e Verde (1918).

The definition of a “crepuscular landscape painter,” in contrast to the excesses of elitist intellectualism, was not reductive; rather, it confirmed Cascella’s highly personal style, untouched by the avant-garde pictorial trends of the 20th century.

Cascella’s works — not only paintings, but also serigraphs, etchings, lithographs, and chromolithographs — are exhibited in prestigious museums in Italy and abroad, including 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, executed using refined pre-Futurist 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.”

“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. ”