scuola romana – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

Paintings by Mario Mafai

Born in Rome in February of 1902, Mario Mafai was an Italian painter. He and his wife, the sculptor Antonietta Raphaël, founded the Scuola Romana art movement. With its firm approach to European Expressionism, the Scuola Romana sought to counter the orderly, neoclassical character of Novecento Italiano, the Italian art movement founded in 1922 which rejected European avant-garde movements and became associated with Fascism.

Although Italian dictator Mussolini had little personal regard for the visual arts, he understood its value as propaganda. For years, his regime supported artists regardless of style, from the futurists who hated tradition to the classically inspired Novecento group which was initiated by art critic Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s mistress. Artists of varying degrees of political commitment entered the official exhibitions and received awards given by the regime for their work. The regime decreed in 1927 that all exhibitions must be authorized by the government and published in the official journal of record, the Gazzette Ufficiale. While the state did not dictate art’s content, it established control over the structure that enabled the art to reach a wider audience.

Mario Mafai left traditional education early in his training and, along with fellow student Gino Bonichi, chose to attend the free Scuola Libera di Nudo, a life drawing component of Rome’s Academy of Fine Art. Most of Mafai’s formative art training was gained through readings in the Fine Arts Library at Palazzo Venezia and by studying artwork at Rome’s many galleries and museums. Influenced by the style of modernist painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi, Mafai focused on the tonal quality of his work; he represented everyday objects with subtle color graduations that lent a magical existence to the painted image. Mafai painted from reality and portrayed his many views of the city of Rome with a fresh sense of curiosity.

In 1925 during their studies at the Academy, Mafai met Antonietta Raphaël, a graduate in piano from London’s Royal Academy of Music, who was studying sculpture and painting. They began a lifelong relationship that encompassed both their private life and the arts. In 1927, they relocated into apartment number 325 on Via Cavour which soon became a meeting place for the literati of Rome, among which were the poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Libero de Libero, and artists such as Corrado Cagli and Mafai’s friend Gino Bonichi, known in the art world as Scipione.

In 1927, Mario Mafai had his first exhibition, organized by the National Association of Artists, at a gallery in Via Margutta. His second show was held in the following year at the 94th Exhibition of the Society of Amateurs and Connoisseurs of Fine Arts. Along with a collective group of young artists, Mafai exhibited his strong anti-impressionistic paintings at the 1929 Young Painters Convention held at the Palazzo Doria. He was deeply critical of Mussolini’s urban transformation of Rome, which razed many working-class housing districts. This criticism was particularly expressed in Mafai’s 1936-1939 “Demolition of the Suburbs”, a series of city views illustrating the destruction of these districts.

In 1938, Italy passed and began enforcing its discriminatory Racial Laws, This was a series of separate bills, between 1938 and 1944, that excluded Italian Jews and native inhabitants of the colonies from school, academia, politics, finances, and the professional world. Civil rights and travel were restricted, books were banned, and assets and property eventually taken. Mario Mafai and his wife experienced the cruelty of Fascism personally, as Antonietta Raphaël was the daughter of a Lithuanian rabbi. He and his wife left Rome and relocated to Genova where they found help from friends and collectors of their art.

Despite being declared a second-class citizen with no rights, Mafai was drafted into the reserve Italian forces during World War II. During the war years, he painted his “Fantasies” series, violent war scenes inspired by Francisco de Goya’s engravings “Disasters of War”. Mafai’s brutal reflections on the war depicted soldiers as sinister, spectral forms committing brutal acts against civilians. Mafai returned to Rome in 1943 and continued working on his principal themes.

At the end of Mussolini’s dictatorship, the importance of Mafai’s work became widely recognized. Entered in exhibitions throughout Italy, his paintings won many awards. For a period starting in 1957, Mafai rejected his previous artistic path of figurative work and started using a bold smashing of colors and shapes in an abstract form. Thirty of these works, which reduced the image to its essence, were shown in an exhibition entitled “Ropes”.

Mario Mafai died in Rome on the 31st of March in 1965. After his death, he was celebrated with an important retrospective of his work at Rome’s Ninth Quadrennial in 1965. Established as a widely exhibited sculptor, Antonietta Raphaël died ten years later in Rome.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Mario Mafai in His Studio”, 1938, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Mario Mafai, “Paesaggio (Lungara)”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 38 x 41 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Mario Mafai, “Self-Portrait”, 1928, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Mario Mafai, “Osteria al Neon”, 1952, Oil on Canvas, 77 x 77 cm, Private collection, Rome

The Artwork of Corrado Cagli

Born in the city of Ancona in February of 1910, Corrado Cagli was an Italian painter of Jewish heritage. Little information on his formative years is available; however, it is known that, at the age of five, his family relocated to Rome. Cagli grew up in a largely assimilated secular family, who had come to terms with its Jewish religion as antisemitism became more aggressive in Fascist Italy. His ties to his Italian heritage were always strong; even in his later years of exile from Italy, it was important for him to maintain a tie with his homeland.

Corrado Cagli’s first commissioned work was a 1927 mural painted on a building in Via Sistina, the street at the top of Rome’s Spanish Steps. In the following year, Cagli received another commission in Rome for a mural in Via Vantaggio. He had a remarkably early success in Italy; still in his twenties in the early 1930s, he was already famous nationally. Cagli had his first solo exhibition in 1932 at Rome’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna and showed at the Milan Triennale in 1936.

Along with other artists such as Emanuele Cavalli and Giuseppe Capogrossi, Cagli was a member of the Scuola Romana, an art movement of Expressionist painters in Rome who were active between 1928 and 1945. A rising star of the Scuola Romana, Cagli was supported by Italy’s Fascist regime despite being both Jewish and a homosexual. He was chosen to represent Italy at the 1930 Paris Exposition, the Venice Biennale, and other prestigious expositions.

In 1938, the Leggi Razzial were promulgated by the Fascist government; this series of laws enforced racial discrimination in Italy, directed mainly against Jewish Italians and inhabitants of Italy’s colonies. Two of Corrado Cagli’s murals were censored by the government as they did not fit with the regime’s rhetoric and stylistic preferences. With the enactment of the Racial Laws, Cagli was forced into exile, first to Paris, a place he had visited as a young star painter from Italy, and then to the United States, where he later became a citizen. His first showing was at the Julien Levy Gallery, a source for surrealist work.

Corrado Cagli rarely had a proper studio during his exile years, which made painting difficult. Most of his work done in the United States is on paper. Cagli had always valued drawing as an art form; in his exile, they became the primary instrument of his artistic search. His use of paper as a medium was also the result of a crisis he went through with his idea of painting. In the 1930s, despite having been forced into exile, Cagli still retained the artistic ambitions of Italy and saw painting as a public art essential to constructing an Italian national identity.

Cagli enlisted in the United States Army and was recognized for his artistic talent. During his training he painted barracks, made his own drawings, and illustrated a military magazine. Later during the war, he worked as a military artist drawing scenes from the campaigns. Cagli fought at the 1944 Normandy landings and, later, in Belgium and Germany. Near the end of the war, he drew a series of dramatic drawings based on the liberation of the Buschenwald concentration camp.

After the war, Cagli returned in 1948 to Rome and made it his permanent residence. Because of his past as a former regime-endorsed artist and a Jewish exile from Fascism, Cagli did not fit into any of the factions of Italy’s post-war heated cultural disputes. He arrived into Italy’s art world with a metaphysical route towards abstraction which was opposite to the Neo-Cubist trend that dominated postwar Italian painting. Settled in Italy, Cagli began a series of experimental works in multiple mediums, including ceramics, mosaics, tapestries, architectural decoration, ballet scenery, and costumes.

Corrado Cagli helped organize the Galleria La Cometa in Rome and, along with poet Libero De Libero, created an artistic circle of musicians, writers, architects, painters and sculptors. He was involved with New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s 1949 exhibition, “20th Century Italian Art” and facilitated the 1950 opening of the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York City. In August of 1972, Cagli was commissioned as the official banner painter for the Palio di Siena, the twice yearly equestrian competition held in Siena, Italy.

Cagli was awarded the Guggenheim Prize in 1946 and, in 1954, the Marzotto Prize, given by the Marzotto fashion company for his contributions to the cultural rebirth of Italy after the war. Corrado Cagli died in Rome in 1976.

Notes: An article on Corrado Cagli’s 1936 mural “The Battle of San Marino”, now housed in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, can be found in a previous posting on this site.

An interview between author Raffaele Bedarida and Alessandro Cassin, Director of Centro Primo Levi, entitled “Corrado Cagli, the American Years” can be found online at Printed_Matter located at: http://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/corrado-cagli-the-american-years/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Corrado Cagli”, Circa 1930s

Second Insert Image: Corrado Cagli, “Ritmi Cellulari in Chiave di Giallo, 1949, Mised Media on Canvas on Paper, 90 x 70 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Corrado Cagli, “narcissus”, Date Unknown, Silkscreen Print, Edition of 50,, Sheet Size 90 x 85 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Corrado Cagli in His Studio in Rome”, December 1969, Radiocorriere Magazine, Gelatin Silver Print