Beschreibung:

CORRADO CAGLI Ancona, 1910 - Roma, 1976 Portrait of Ebe, 1936-37 Oil on board, 52 x 40 cm Signed lower left: Cagli Photo-certificate by Archivio Corrado Cagli Rome, 2019 LITERATURE AND EXHIBITED: “Cagli. La collezione Ebe Cagli Seidenberg”, curated by G. Di Genova, Edizioni Bora, p. 54 n° 12 BIOGRAPHY: In 1915 he moved with his family to Rome. After completing his classical studies, he enrolled at the Academy and attended the studio of the elderly master Paolo Paschetto. In 1927 he made his debut with a tempera mural in a room in via Sistina, followed the following year by another mural, this time in lean tempera, in a hall in via del Vantaggio. Following his "mural" vocation with enthusiasm, in 1930 in Umbertide he created eight fresco paintings in the Maravelli-Reggiani house. In Umbertide he is also artistic director of the Rometti ceramic factory, to which he gives a modern and qualitative imprint. From the very beginning he has shown to have a lively and restless personality, animated by an imaginative and critical intelligence. He sets his investigation on a persistent technical and expressive experimentalism. According to Cagli, the artist is the one who expresses himself through a global concept of art and who joins and justifies his specific operation within a cultural and ideological context. In 1932 he held his first exhibition solo exhibition with Adriana Pincherle in the "Art Gallery of Rome". Among other things, he exhibits photomontages of sports subjects. In the same year he approaches Giuseppe Capogrossi and Emanuele Cavalli Formed together the group of the "New Roman painting" at the end of 1932 in Rome, the three artists exhibited in the "Art Gallery of Rome" and in 1933 in Milan in the "Il Milione" gallery. Towards the end of the year while drafting the "Manifesto of Plastic Primordialism", to be published on the occasion of their exhibition in Paris in the "Galerie Bonjean" (December 1933), they quarrel over theoretical differences and practical issues and definitively dissolve the partnership. In those years in Rome, despite being just twenty, he is considered the leading exponent of the new artistic generation ("Cagli woke up the dead in these years" Guttuso wrote in 1951). He animates a group of very young artists: Mirco, Afro, Ziveri, Guttuso, Fazzini, who gravitate around the gallery of Dario Sabatello, who was also very young. He also carries out an intense theoretical and critical activity from the pages of important magazines, including that of rationalist architecture "Quadrante", directed by Pier Maria Bardi and Massimo Bontempelli (the artist's uncle). He announces, still confident and enthusiastic about the Regime, "a primordial dawn" in which "the imagination relives all the astonishment and trembles of all the mysteries" (Advances on the school of Rome, 1933). Also from the columns of "Quadrante" he participates in the debate on mural painting and invokes the "collaboration of the arts" (architecture and painting) and the need to "build muscles for cyclical and polyphonic art" (Muri ai pittori, 1933). Among other murals, he performed: a fresco for the V Triennale (1933), four panels for the II Quadriennale (1935), a great cycle entitled Triumph of Mussolini, for the International Exhibition in Paris (1937), defining a new function mythological and social of painting. From 1935 to 1938 he was the animator, in the role of councilor, of the "Galleria della Cometa", directed by Libero de Libero and inaugurated with an exhibition of fifty drawings (1935). In 1936 he held a personal painting there and in 1937 and 1938 he exhibited in the headquarters of the "Cometa" in New York. In 1938, faced with the onslaught of racial persecutions, being of Jewish origin, he took refuge in Paris and then in New York (1939), where he opened a studio. In 1941, having become an American citizen, he enlisted in the army and participated in the war in Europe. In Germany, when he entered the Buchenwald concentratio