This is Felice Casorati

Felice Casorati (December 4, 1883 – March 1, 1963) was an Italian painter, sculptor, and printmaker. The paintings for which he is most noted improve figure compositions, portraits and nevertheless lifes, which are often distinguished by peculiar perspective effects.

Casorati was born in Novara. He showed an in the future passion for music, but solitary his psychoanalysis of piano after a enormous illness, and became impatient in art. To please his mom he studied pretense at the University of Padua until 1906, but his want to be a painter was avowed in 1907 following a painting of his was shown in the Venice Biennale. The works he produced in the forward years of his career were naturalistic in style, but after 1910 the have an effect on of the symbolists and particularly of Gustav Klimt turned him toward a more visionary approach. In 1915 he had a solo exhibition at the Rome Secession III, where he showed several paintings and the first of his sculptures in varnished terracotta. His military facilitate in World War I began that year and lasted until his freeing from the army after the death of his daddy in 1917.

In 1918, “intrigued by the decadent ventilate of Turin later than its sinister views”, he fixed there with his mommy and two sisters. His works of the next decade typify, in their emphasis upon geometry and formal clarity, the “return to order” then prevalent in the arts as a greeting to the war. Although many critics found his take effect cold, cerebral, and academic, Casorati achieved international greeting as a leading figure in this movement. Often working in tempera, Casorati drew inspiration from his breakdown of Renaissance masters, especially Piero della Francesca, as in his 1922 portrait entitled Silvana Cenni. This symmetrical composition of a seated woman in a white dress is perhaps the best-known of the artist’s works. In it, the cautious rendering of volumes results paradoxically in a wisdom of unreality which is characteristic of Casorati’s art.

In 1925, Raffaello Giolli summarized the disconcerting aspects of Casorati’s art—”The volumes have no weight in them, and the colors no body. Everything is fictitious: even the buzzing lack whatever nervous vitality. The sun seems to be the moon … nothing is unchangeable or definite”—and argued that these unconditionally qualities come going on with the child support for his function its originality, and connect him to the metaphysical painters. Casorati himself wrote, in 1931: “In taking up, against me, the obsolescent polemic of classicism and romanticism, people rail adjoining intellectualized and university order, accuse my art of subconscious insincere, and wilfully academic—in a word, of innate neoclassical. … since my art is born, so to speak, from within, and never has its source in changing “impressions”, it is quite natural that … static forms, and not the shapeless images of passion, should be reflected in my works”.

Briefly arrested in 1923 for his involvement with an anti-Fascist group, Casorati bearing in mind avoided antagonizing the regime. Beginning in 1923, he opened his studio to the youngster art students of Turin, and to emerging Italian artists such as Quinto Martini and painters of the Gruppo dei Sei (Group of Six). In 1925, one of his students was Daphne Mabel Maugham, later his wife. One of his forward-thinking students was the Italian painter Enrico Accatino. His Work Carità di San Martino, 1939, is in Museo cantonale d’arte of Lugano. After 1930 the extremity of Casorati’s earlier style softened somewhat and his palette brightened. He continued to exhibit widely, winning many awards, including the First Prize at the Venice Biennale of 1938. He was also effective in stage design. He died in Turin in 1963.

Most of Casorati’s important works are in Italian collections, public and private, including the Modern Art Revoltella Museum in Trieste and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna. Other museums that hold his act out include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.