MAON, Museum of 19th and 20th Century Art in Rende (CS)
April 30, 2015, 6:30 PM
Inauguration of the Exhibition
IN PENOMBRA
Andrea Alfano in the Di Vietri collection
curated by Tonino Sicoli
The exhibition opens on April 30 at 6:30 PM at the MAON, the Museum of 19th and 20th Century Art in Rende “IN PENOMBRA - Andrea Alfano nella collezione Di Vietri” curated by Tonino Sicoli.
This exhibition, which will remain open to the public until June 27, 2015, presents, after the success achieved in Rome at the Crocetti Museum, a significant selection of Andrea Alfano's works belonging to a Roman collection, which is exhibited in its original context.
These are 30 paintings executed between the 1910s and 1950s and preserved for over half a century in the home of his friend and personal doctor, who was at his side until the last moments of his life. The relationship between Alfano and Vincenzo Di Vietri is documented not only by this body of works, but also by an unpublished text, which is published in the catalogue edited by Gangemi, together with a text by Sicoli and a bio-bibliographical note by Roberto Sottile. Alfano does not paint a narrative painting, with articulated and complex scenes, but the effectiveness of the image is entrusted to the individual characters, their faces, their hands, without them being placed in any context.
He places himself in the wake of the Italian artistic tradition, starting from the chiaroscuro naturalism of the seventeenth century to romantic and veristic painting, renewed by hints of European culture. The influence of Daumier and Courbet, but also of the social realism of Pellizza da Volpedo or the energetic neo-baroque tonalism of Scipione make him prefer a warm and tonal painting, made of veiled atmospheres and solidarity participation. Born in Castrovillari in 1879, he first turned his gaze to the world of the humble, of which he was able to capture, in addition to the human mask, emotions and feelings. In their faces he saw the signs of life imprinted, the tired stories of the marginalized, the touching expressions of the common people. Having left Calabria in 1902 with a scholarship from the Province of Cosenza, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. But his reluctance towards any formative discipline in an academic art, soon made him abandon his studies, convinced as he was that true genius must be self-taught.
In Rome he struck up a friendship with a master of the anecdotal genre, Antonio Mancini, with whom he began a long partnership. Mancini introduced him to the "Circolo Artistico", where he had the opportunity to meet many artists, merchants and antique dealers such as Giosi, Augusto and Ugo Jandolo, who helped him survive even when his scholarship was interrupted. Mancini's friends, especially the English painter John Sargent, try to introduce him to the English market, but his crude and bare painting fails to impress the refined clients of the dealer Goupil, who are more attracted by Mancini's brilliant chromatism.
“Look at my portraits,” Alfano explains in Frangipane's “Brutium” in 1956, “A face, two hands: nothing else. I don't wear a tie on my paintings.” His painting is similar in theme to that of Mancini, the “painter of rags,” but the color that in the Roman artist is dense and full-bodied becomes fluid and inconsistent in the Calabrian. The forms are modeled by the light, which nevertheless leaves them in a twilight atmosphere. His first exhibition was in 1906, when he exhibited at the 76th International Exhibition of the Society of Lovers and Cultivators of Fine Arts, together with many other artists who were still unknown but had a great future, such as Balla, Boccioni and Severini.
The Society of Lovers and Cultivators of Fine Arts was founded in Rome in 1829 and for a century (until 1930) it represented a point of reference for Roman and foreign artists residing or working in the city. His power was exercised above all through the sale of the works exhibited and in the choice of those to purchase for public institutions. Alfano was present not only at the 1906 exhibition but also at those of 1908, 1912, 1915, 1918 and 1920. On the occasion of the 1915 exhibition, a Self-portrait was purchased by the Pitti Gallery (1916) and then moved to the Uffizi and, finally, to the Pinacoteca di Ravenna, where it was destroyed during the war.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Alfano performed military service at a military hospital in Rome and in 1917 exhibited at the Mostra del bianco e nero, where he was noticed by Cipriano Efisio Oppo, the future grand commis of art during Fascism. During a stay in Calabria, in 1920 he also took part in the 1st Calabrese Exhibition of Modern Art, where the best Calabrian artists of the period exhibited: from Rubens Santoro to Gaele Covelli, from Francesco Jerace to Alessandro Monteleone.
In Reggio Calabria, in the Government Palace, he created a large painting of over four meters on The reconstruction of Reggio Calabria after the earthquake of 1908 in 1922, while at the 2nd Calabrese Biennial of 1922 he sold a study to the Royal House and a painting, The Bricklayer, to the Ministry of Public Education, destined for the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.
During the twenty-year period he refused to join the fascist party and avoided the regime's exhibitions, even if he painted a portrait of Benito Mussolini and one of Michele Bianchi. At the Mostre Sindacali of 1934, 1945 and 1951, his friend Frangipane sent works from his collection. On the other hand, he participated in Calabrian exhibitions such as the IV Biennale Calabrese in 1926, where he was awarded a gold medal and where he exhibited for the last time with Antonio Mancini, who died in 1930. He chose isolation and withdrew into silence, far from the disasters of war and political compromises. These were the years in which he devoted himself most assiduously to poetry and in 1936 he published his first collection of verses, “Pars Parva”.
After spending the war in Castrovillari, he returned to Rome, where in 1945 he set up an anthological exhibition at the Galleria La Conchiglia, which also marked his return to artistic and exhibition activity. He worked tirelessly with a newfound enthusiasm and new successes, which culminated with the celebrations for his seventieth birthday organized in Rome, Castrovillari and Cosenza. In 1954 he received the insignia of Grand Officer of Merit from the President of the Republic Luigi Einaudi.
Meanwhile, with his advancing age, Alfano's health deteriorated: he was struck by a strong depression and his eyesight worsened until he became almost blind in his last years. He died in Rome in 1967 at the age of eighty-eight, assisted by his family doctor Vincenzo Di Vietri, who took him into his home.
In 2002, a Pinacoteca named after him was ordered in Castrovillari, his hometown, which permanently documents his entire artistic career studied and developed by Enrico Crispolti and the curator of this exhibition, Tonino Sicoli.
