The historic Studio Bolzani Gallery in Milan which brilliantly celebrated the one hundred years in 2022, already for some time “Historical Bottega” in Milan, and very active on the side of modern and contemporary art, offers us for 2025 “The picture of the month”. So that in the windows of the gallery
Strasbourg close to Piazza San Babila we will find every month a painting of exceptional value and an artist of clear fame. For May 2025 it is the turn of a painting by Bruno Cassinari (Piacenza 1912- Milan 1992), Holy fame artist of the second Italian twentieth century; We add that the Bolzani have always been interested in numerous painters of clear fame of contemporaneity. The work exhibited at the Bolzani Studio in Milan (in the Strasbourg Gallery) in this May 2025 has a “flower” oil on a canvas in canvas in 40 × 28 format, signed at the bottom right, dated 1956. Opera in our historical warning that marks the overcoming of figuration and abstraction, having the artist given a new “neocubist” opening. “My painting – said Cassinari – It can never be ‘abstract’, in the sense that it can never be detached from the reality of sensations, nor detached from the joy and the presence of things. I believe too much in the color of the sea, in front of which I work for many months, I believe too much in the splendor of the leaves, in the warmth of human faces, I feel too much weight, because they do not come forward, with arrogance, in my work. I think that these appearances must be illuminated better and better. I try to translate their weight into rhythm more and more clearly, their heat in light“(Ponente, N. (1958): Carrival. La Bussola/ Rome)
Both the years of “current” (which closes in 1943) as well as those immediately after the liberation (1945 – 1950), highlighted in the production of cassinaries the approach to an art that could independently differentiate from the two major trends of the period: abstract and figurative art. This third way of his searched is a very original synthesis of neocubism in which lyricism and reflection on classicism are a compositional exercise of the forms, which has found its highest expression in the two 1940s and 1950 decades. The exhibition “Form, structure and color” highlights the painting of cassinarians as a synthesis of cube-matissian structuring, bright chromatism and contemplation of the truth. The “geometrism”, which Cassinari introduces more and more from the early 1950s, is considered by him the best way to approach reality and sensations lived.
It is precisely to this geometrism, to these lines in freedom that mark the work “Fiori” of ’56, here today on display by Bolzani, which we identify not only the trace of what has been called its third way, with the overcoming of the figurative and abstractism, but the absolute singing of colors and shapes that make it a small masterpiece.
Bruno Cassinari (Piacenza 1912-Milan 1992), is one of the most incisive representatives of the current anti-nineteenth-century generation, around whose work the painters of artistic path companions converge. The “friends” of Cassinari, peers who animated the Milanese cultural timperies that found themselves around the editorial staff of the magazine “Current” and beyond, joined the author to those years of extraordinary cultural awakening, urged in painting by the initial lyricism towards the subsequent expressionism and realism, to be understood in the sense of pictorial reflection on the truth, in its social and moral implications and not in the meaning of mere transcription. Veristica. Prepaid tendencies from the cultural thrusts and germinated anxieties within the Milanese artistic life in the early 1930s and evolved into expressive energy of greater tension between 1938 and 1943.
The rich production of Bruno Cassinari is identified within the arch of the pictorial activity from the 1930s finals to reach the threshold of the seventies. Works that retrace the author’s artistic adventure for substantial stages, motivated existentially within the current climate and later increasingly matured on independent individual, psychological and chromatic reflections. By the youthful coloring plans organized in “color architectures”, so defined by Giovanni Testori, to the relationship of cassinarians with current, marked by the beginnings by lyrical, neo -Veravonian essays, subsequently bound to a more decisive expressionistic excitement and linguistic labor accrued in the war and in the following phase, in the light of the association with Morlotti. And again the neo-Cubist and narrative topographies of the emotionally loaded work performed at Antibes starting from 1949, through the rear abandonment to nature and the immersion in its physicality, poetic belonging to the period of the return to Gropparello (1960s), to land the suspended and evocative atmospheres of the early seventies. Since 1942 he has been documenting -at the light of the Picassian reference-, The search for a new form tested in that round in the “figurative equivalent” related Also by friends Guttuso, Morlotti, Ciro Agostoni.
Bruno Cassinari was born in Piacenza in 1912. Student of the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, where he studied with Aldo Carpi (1934-1938), The fascist regime in Italy challenges vehemently, so that his art soon takes on a political dimension, while also inspired by the avant -garde of the twentieth century, the Fauvism, to Expressionism and above all to Cubism. His intellectual opposition is manifested through adhesion to the current group, which he joined in 1939. The group, which also includes Renato Guttuso, Emilio Vedova, Renato Birolli, Ennio Morlotti, Ernesto Treccani and Giuseppe Migneco, among its members, recognizes the importance of the work of Picasso Guernica as a symbol and aesthetic of the struggle against barbarism and tyranny through expression through expression. artistic. The same year he wins the Littoriale Prize. In 1941, with the help and support of Elio Vittorini, Cassinari organized his first personal, exhibiting a portrait of Rosa Birolli (the portrait of Rosetta), with whom he wins the Bergamo prize. The next decade is characterized by international aspirations and collaborations. Like many of his modern masters – Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh or Modigliani – Cassinari is seduced by the magnetic charm of France. However, unlike his contemporaries, he does not choose Paris as a destination, but Antibes, where he resides between 1949 and 1952. Closer to his Mediterranean sensitivity, the French coast proves to be a rich source of inspiration and opportunities. He meets contemporary masters such as Chagall, Matisse, Braque and Picasso, who personally invite him to exhibit his works at the Antibes museum. Its international period is characterized by countless exhibitions and by participation in various biennials. Cassinari extends its artistic activity to the American continent by participating in various exhibitions starting from 1949, including Twentieth-Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. In 1950 he participated for the first time in the Venice Biennale with five paintings. He was present again at the Biennale in 1952 (winner of the Italian Painting Grand Prix), 1956, 1960, 1962 and 1964. In 1951 he participated in the Italian Artists of Today exhibition in Scandinavia, set up in the museums of Gothenburg, Helsinki, Oslo and Copenhagen. The same year he participated in the first edition of the painters of today France-Italy and wins the Taranto of painting. During the decade, Cassinari becomes synonymous with Italian contemporary art and figure regularly in the retrospective or inaugural exhibitions of this new generation of Italian artists. Among the examples worthy of note include an Italian contemporary art exhibition organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1956 and the Italian Art of the 20th Century exhibitions in various museums in Australia, Modern Italian Art in London, Plymouth and Birmingham in the United Kingdom in 1956, Painting in Post-War Italy 1945-1957 at the Columbia University of New York from 1957, Moderne Italiaanse Kunst in Amsterdam and Eindhoven, Italian Painings of Toray in London and Peintres d’Aujourd’hui France-Italie in Paris (all in the 1960s). The spirit of resistance of Cassinari is also celebrated in different exhibitions, including the post -war period. Italian painting from ’45 to ’55 at the Estense Castle of Ferrara or art and resistance in Europe at the Civic Gallery of Bologna and that of Turin (1965). The retrospectives begin to multiply in the mid -1960s. In 1965 the Bergamini Gallery in Milan exhibited a wide selection of paintings, sculptures and watercolors. The Gallery of Busto Arsizio dedicates an anthological to 1981 to Cassinari, with oils, drawings, sculptures and lithographs. His hometown does the same two years later, inaugurating a retrospective of 150 works curated by Gian Alberto Dell’Acqua and Giovanni Anzani at Palazzo Farnese. Cassinari died in his Milan studio in 1992but his work continues to be celebrated in numerous postume exhibitions.
Carlo Franza