Felice Casorati

After the war his activity was to be particularly significant in catalysing his youthful energies (shows in Verona in 1918; Turin 1919; exhibition of the Ca’ Pesaro dissident artists, 1920; the Turin Quadriennale show, 1923). But it was to be his painting above all that became fundamental for the “return to order” of Italian painting. His own return was at first characterised by a phase of reconstructing a space that was apparently rigorous but, in fact, was enigmatically metaphysical (L’attesa, 1918-19; Anna Maria De Lisi, 1919; Mattino, 1920; L’uomo delle botti, 1920).

Then, swept away by the Cézanne exhibition at the 1920 Venice Biennale, the artist tried to solidify his painting, in a fifteenth century and classicist way, in large compositions in which the figures were placed in his studio (Fanciulla con linoleum, 1921, Turin, private collection; Silvana Cenni, 1922, Turin, private collection; Lo studio, 1923, destroyed; Meriggio, 1923, Revoltella museum, Trieste; Conversazione platonica, 1925, Florence, private collection; Ragazze dormienti, 1927, Maranello, private collection); in still-lifes (Uova sul cassettone, 1920, Turin, private collection; Maschere, 1921, Alessandria, Pinacoteca Civica; La zucca, shown at the Venice Biennale in 1924); and in silent and solemnly pure portraits (Ritratto della sorella, 1922; portraits of members of the Gualino family, 1922-23; Ritratto di Hena Rigotti, 1924), all works seen at the most important exhibitions of the 1920s and which aroused a great debate in Italy about modernity.

In particular, his solo room at the 1924 Venice Biennale - with a catalogue presentation by Lionello Venturi and installed concurrently with the rooms exhibiting work by Ubaldo Oppi and the painters of the Italian Novecento movement - for the first time made the visitors face the problem of his intellectual return to antiquity and a decided break with links to nineteenth century painting.

In about 1920-30, he accepted invitations to the Venice Biennale and the first Quadriennale in Rome. Casorati’s painting, after a brief period of interest in landscape, decisively changed and saw a rejection of the chilly neo-Mantegna purity of the recent past in favour of a painting that, with its mainly tenuous and pearly hues, tended to open up and amalgamate (Susanna, 1929; La toeletta, Conversazione alla finestra, Tre sorelle, 1930) inspired by the contemporary work of the Sei Pittori group in Turin.

In the post-war period (in 1941 he had been nominated professor of painting at the Accademia Albertina in Turin) his activity continued for almost twenty years until his death, with mainly paintings of figures or still-lifes, all with a sharp spatial definition and a tendency to decoration that was not untouched by contemporary abstract painting. Lastly, it is well worth mentioning Casorati’s many other works outside painting: first of all that of an etcher, an activity which was particular intense during the second decade of the century; then there were sculptures,; mosaics, and, last but not least, his activity as a stage and costume designer at the Maggio Musicale, Florence (1933, 1935, 1950), the Scala opera house in Milan (1942, 1946-50), the Venice Festival (1947), the Eliseo in Rome (1950), and the Piccolo Teatro in Milan (1951).