Description
FERRUCCIO FERRAZZI Rome, 1891 - 1978
Portrait of little girl
Encaustic, 32,5 x 24 x 3 cm
Signed lower right: Ferrazzi BIOGRAPHY: His father, Stanislao, is a sculptor who initiates him into art. Ferruccio is the elder brother of three other children: Riccardo (who will become a painter with the name of Benvenuto, in memory of Cellini), Adele and Maria. Between 1904 and 1905 he attended the studio of Francesco Bergamini, a pupil of Michele Cammarano; while between 1906 and 1908 he enrolled at the same time at the Free Nude School and at the evening school of the French Academy. . He surprised the Roman artistic environment by making his debut in 1907, at the age of sixteen, in the LXXVII Exposition of Fine Arts, where he exhibited a self-portrait in which the color is freely applied with the palette knife. The following year he won a scholarship at the Catel Institute, which finally allowed him to devote himself completely to art. It is in fact placed under the artistic protection of Max Roeder, a landscape painter of Boecklinian ancestry, who introduced him to the colony of German artists. In 1910 he was admitted to the 9th Venice Biennale, where his work was placed in the "Youth Room". In 1911 the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome bought him the painting Focolare exhibited in the international exhibition in Rome. Finally at the end in the same year he won the National Artistic Pension. At the beginning of the new year he is already in Paris with his father to study the rotations of light in the ancient and modern painters in museums, among them Georges Seurat. . In this period the artist thus alternates works of Futurist ancestry (he is a friend of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) with others of Cézannian influence. . Experiment with new pictorial recipes and frequent the Prints and Drawings Department. He also appears well inserted in the artistic and intellectual milieu of the capital: he is very close friends with Federico Tozzi, a soldier in Rome, with Luigi Trifoglio, Roberto Melli, Giacomo Balla and Mario Broglio. Between August 1915 and February 1916 he enrolled in the music institute. The results of his efforts can be seen as early as 1916 at the LXXXV Exhibition of the Society of Amateurs and Cultors of Fine Arts, where he personally sets up the room that is assigned to him as the interior of a prism, where the paintings and pictorial fragments show irregular shapes, skewed, linked to the complex perspective concepts of the same works. While the Roman environment cries out to scandal and the Pensionato is removed from him, whose regulations prohibit him from exhibiting, the Signorelli spouses, patrons of Armando Spadini, buy him some works, including a sculpture, Pietà. He then obtained a new studio where he already lives with the whole family, in the archaeological area of the Domus Aurea. In the meantime, Walter Minnich, a Swiss doctor passionate about art collector and in particular of the German expressionists (especially of Max Pechstein, his friend), was very impressed by the works of Ferrazzi to the Amateurs and Cultori, to the point that he bought several. He also invites him to stay in the Montreux house on the banks of the Lake Geneva. In 1917 he exhibited at the Kunsthaus in Zurich (April 1917), reading in the rich library of Minnich (among others Ferrero, Bergson). These readings join many others that the artist continually feeds on: Novalis, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Peguy. Returning to Rome between May and September 1917, at the end of the year he was called to fulfill the obligations of military service in Sardinia. In 1919, still partially involved in futurist suggestions, he exhibited in the Great National Futurist Exhibition, held at Palazzo Cova in Milan (later in Florence, Genoa and Moscow). In 1921 he held his first solo show in the Casa d'Arte Italiana directed by Enrico Prampolini and Mario Recchi of the Futurist area. He exhibits two oils on paper, watercolors and drawings, many made in Switzerland and Sardinia, which are criticized by Cipriano Efisio Oppo in "L'idea Nazionale" (21 January 1921), because of "Nordic" ancestry. In spring he participates in the First Roman Biennial. In July 1922 he married Horitia, daughter of Francesco Randone, ceramic master, a lover of hermetic philosophies and animated by principles of humanitarian socialism. From this union three daughters will be born: Fabiola, Metella and Ilaria. In 1923, the personal exhibition at the Second Roman Biennale definitively indicated him as a point of reference in the Roman artistic panorama, above all for the new generation. Among his collectors and patrons stand out the Signorelli spouses, Emanuele Fiano and the Ottolenghi spouses, later Alfredo Casella. Between 1925 and 27 he studied Piero della Francesca in Florence and Arezzo, in the same period in which he started his studies for the small temple commissioned from him. from the Ottolenghi to Acqui Terme, architecturally designed by Marcello Piacentini. Ferrazzi searches for strict and absolute principles of composition in Piero, capable of ordering the emotional aspect of the figuration, which in the decorative cycle of the Ottolenghi Mausoleum is inspired by eschatological themes. In the meantime, in 1926 he took part in the Exhibition of Modern Italian Art exhibited at the Gran Central Art Galleries in New York. At the end of the year he was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize which, chaired in this edition by Pierre Bonnard, is awarded for the first time to an Italian. Since 1929 he has held the chair of pictorial decoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. The first monograph on his art is also dedicated to him in the precious "Modern Italian Art" series, directed by Giovanni Scheiwiller for the Hoepli publishing house in Milan. The Thirties opened with the participation in the Italian Novecento Exhibition organized by Margherita Sarfatti in Buenos Aires, after misunderstandings in 1926 made him decide not to exhibit at the first "Novecento Italiano" exhibition (1926). In 1931 Cipriano Efisio Oppo, the new "arbiter" of the arts under the Regime, assigned him a personal room as part of the First Quadrennial of National Art in Rome. He is awarded a third prize. The first experiments of encaustic begin, influenced by the frescoes found in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii by Amedeo Maiuri. This decade sees Ferrazzi fully participating in the central debate on mural painting, which has its "daring" in Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Gino Severini, Corrado Cagli, Carlo Carrà and Massimi Campigli and involves international figures such as Le Corbusier. Ferrazzi is firmly convinced that the figurative arts must enter into the "organic function" performed by architecture. Meanwhile, he was commissioned by Marcello Piacentini for the Ministry of Corporations to create the seven large Tapestries of the Corporations for the Palazzo delle Corporazioni, designed by Piacentini himself and Antonio Vaccaro. this is the first large public commission for Ferrazzi, which sees him together with Mario Sironi (in charge of a stained glass window), author of a non-pictorial intervention. In the spring of 1933 he moved to the studio-house he built in via di Villa Emiliani, in the Parioli district, above the Tiber valley. In April, despite not being a member of the National Fascist Party, he was elected Academic of Italy for the Arts class, chosen from a trio with Mario Sironi and Ardengo Soffici. Through this office, he will be able to promptly work in favor of young artists (Guttuso, Ziveri, Cagli, Mafai), as evidenced by some documents preserved in the Ferrazzi Archive. In these years he participated in the Carnegie Prize, in the Venice Biennials, in the trade unions and in many foreign exhibitions. In 1936 the Italian and many foreign intellectual forces met at the VI Volta Conference, promoted by the Royal Academy of Italy to discuss the "Relationship of architecture with the figurative arts". In addition to Ferrazzi, the following are called: Le Courbusier, Paul Fierens, Massimo Bontempelli, Henri Matisse, Armando Brasini, Carlo Carrà, Giuseppe Pagano, Cipriano Efisio Oppo, Marcello Piacentini, Felice Casorati, André Lhote. . In 1937 he was appointed member of the ordering commission of the Italian Art Exhibition at the Universal Exposition in Paris. At the end of the year he travels to the United States to serve on the jury for the Carnegie Prize held in Pittsburgh. In New York, he carefully visits the galleries, the museums, paying close attention to the Fayum collection kept at the Metropolitan. He takes part in one of the last major pictorial works promoted by the Regime in the Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan, the work of Marcello Piacentini. In 1941 he completed two great encaustices La Scuola and L 'aurora on the rotation of the lands in the Sala del Galilei of the University of Padua. In 1943 he sets up a personal exhibition in the Rome Gallery which collects one hundred and forty-three works as well as drawings and pastels made since 1908. A solo exhibition by Ferrazzi was inaugurated in February 1946, which on the walls of the San Marco Gallery displays a new group of paintings on the theme of the Apocalypse, including the recent images of the Hiroshima bomb. The exhibition is promoted by the "Art Club". He participates again in the Quadrennial, Biennial and in the last edition of the Carnegie Prize, which took place in 1950, where he sends a masterpiece of these years: The room. In this period he concentrated above all on religious pictorial cycles, such as the frescoes in the Sanctuary of Santa Rita da Cascia and in the Basilica of Santo Eugenio in Rome, both made in 1951.. In 1954 he concludes the great mosaic, Apocalypse, which takes place on the walls of the crypt of the Ottolenghi Mausoleum. From this decade he spends much of his time in the new house overlooking the sea in Santa Liberata sull'Argentario. Here he mainly dedicates himself to sculpture by roughing out the natural stones embedded in the ground and the nenfro blocks of the Canino quarries, which he then completes with painting. This sculptural complex, which incorporates many themes treated throughout the entire span of its activity, includes the evocative Theater of Life, which contains and ideally completes his long journey in art. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferrazzi, monograph with self-presentation of the artist, Milan 1929; C.L. Ragghianti, J. Recovery, Ferrazzi., Rome 1974; E. CARli, Ferrazzi. sculptor, Florence 1974; Ferruccio Ferrazzi from 1916 to 1946, exhibition catalog, edited by B. Mantura, Spoleto 1989; I miti di Ferrazzi, catalog of the exhibition by V. Rivosecchi, text by M. Quesada, biography by F.R. Morelli, Rome 1992; Ferruccio Ferrazzi, the drawing, catalog of the exhibition edited by F. D'Amico, W. Guadagnini, G. Roganti, Modena 1993; Venice and the Biennale, the paths of taste, catalog of the exhibition edited by F. Scotton, Venice 1995.
Good condition, slight color losses
