The Eye of Painting, Circa 1950

Mino Maccari   Famous Artists

The eye of painting is a work of art created by Mino Maccari (1924-1989) in the mid-20th century. Colored woodcut on paper. Hand-signed at the bottom, numbered 4/89 copies and titled on the left margin. 

Mino Maccari (Siena, 1924-Rome, 16 June 1989) was an Italian writer, painter, engraver and journalist, winner of the Feltrinelli Prize for painting in 1963 and first winner of the Forte dei Marmi Satire Prize in 1973.After completing secondary studies, he enrolled at university. An interventionist like many young people of his time, he took part in the Great War at the age of nineteen as a field artillery officer. At the end of the conflict he resumed his university studies in Siena and in 1920 he graduated in law. In 1924 he was called by Angiolo Bencini to take care of the printing of the magazine Il Selvaggio, openly fascist, revolutionary and anti-bourgeois, where his first engravings were published. After a few years of coexistence between work at the newspaper and the law firm, at the beginning of 1926 he left the law profession to take on the direction of Il Selvaggio which he would maintain until 1942. In 1928 he was the author of the small volume published by Vallecchi (Florence) Il Trastullo di Strapaese (songs and woodcuts) which collected fascist songs (the same book was seized several times from Antonio Gramsci during his detention). With the transfer of the Selvaggio editorial team in 1925 from Colle di Val d'Elsa to Florence, Maccari collaborated with Ardengo Soffici, Ottone Rosai and Achille Lega. In the meantime, between 1927 and 1930, he made himself known to the general public as a painter by participating in various national exhibitions. Also in 1930 Maccari worked in Turin at La Stampa as editor-in-chief and had the writer Curzio Malaparte as director. His presence in the cultural and editorial world of the fascist regime is very intense, he writes and collaborates on various magazines: Quadrivio, L'Italia Letteraria, L'Italiano and Omnibus by Leo Longanesi; then, during the war, in Bottai's Primato and, subsequently, again in Pannunzio's Il Mondo (from the first issue, in 1949), up to Federigo Valli's Documento. His graphic production is also vast, ranging from Vallecchi's Album (1925), to Strapaese's Il trastullo (1928), to Linoleum (1931). Maccari illustrated Antonio Baldini's The Old Woman of Bal Bullier in 1934 and in 1942 he published the Album portfolio, followed by Come Quando Fuori Piove and Il Superfluo Illustrato. For his pictorial work rich in evident chromatic accentuations and fast brushstrokes, the violent drawing combined with the lively trait of the graphic sign of his engravings, he is recognized by critics as a complete artist. In 1962 he was also entrusted with the presidency of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome and managed to obtain a personal exhibition at Gallery 63 in New York. His production of drawings, watercolors, tempera, etc. it is exterminated,sometimes in collaboration with prestigious publishing houses; it is worth mentioning, just as an excellent example, the 32 drawings in black and white with which he illustrated Il gusto di vive, a volume that collects writings by Giancarlo Fusco, edited by Natalia Aspesi and published by Laterza in 1985. Maccari, Sienese and great Contrada supporter of the Torre, he painted the Palio of 16 August 1970 won by Selva. In 1973 he was awarded the Forte dei Marmi Political Satire Award, an award created that year. He died without great fanfare, in silence, at the age of ninety, in Rome, on 16 June 1989.