Natura Morta, Circa 1975

Bruno Cassinari   Famous Artists

Bruno Cassinari, born in Plaisance in 1912, moved to Milan in 1929, where he exercised an intense activity as soon as he joined the "Corrente" group, but his love for the French coast and, before that, for his native countryside, leads to periodically experimenting with alternatives to the indispensable size of the studio in Via San Tomaso.

Antibes in the summer of 1950 - as well as Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Paul Eluard, Jean Cocteau But above all, this Mediterranean stay represents the meeting of his painting with the breath and the color of the sea, marking a phase of particular energy De the other Gropparello, primordial and maternal land, in fact rediscovered from 1962, when Cassinari reopened his workshop there in the company of Ernesto Treccani, two years after the death of his mother.

Rural environment already explored in the 1940s, today moved and dramatically illuminated. Each place reinterpreted through the power of color, the dominant feature of his work which immediately aroused particular attention from critics – memorable words by Elio Vittorini in 1941 – and early institutional recognition abroad: already in the 1950s, Cassinari's work only received homage at the Venice Biennale (1952), but he was also known on the international art scene, for having participated in important exhibitions in the United States (1952; 1957) , in Australia (1956), in Latin America (1957). Worldly portraitist – the paintings of Gina Lollobrigida (1955) and Carla Fracci (1958) are famous – and, at the same time, painter of the sacred – his stained glass windows in the basilica of San Domenico in Siena (1982) – for more than half a year. century devoted to art with an almost devotional fervor, Cassinari disappeared in Milan in 1992, in the studio which bore traces of his artistic temperament everywhere, in the canvases to be finished, in the beloved antiques, in the sketches hand drawn and in color sediments on the walls.