Mario Sironi

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Mario Sironi (May 12, 1885 – August 13, 1961) was an Italian modernist artist who was active as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and designer.

[edit] Biography

Born in Sassari on the island of Sardinia, Sironi spent his childhood in Rome. Brief study of engineering at the University of Rome was ended by a nervous breakdown in 1903, one of many severe depressions that would recur throughout his life.[1] Thereafter he dedicated himself to painting, and attended the Scuola Libera del Nudo, where he met Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni. These artists, who would later become the leading Futurists, were then painting in a Neo-Impressionist style. Sironi's development closely tracked theirs, and he adopted the Futurist style by 1913.

After service in World War I, Sironi's version of Futurism gave way to an art of massive, immobile forms. In paintings such as La Lampada of 1919 (Pinateca di Brera, Milan), mannequins substitute for figures, as in the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. Like many artists in the period following the war, Sironi looked to the art af the past for inspiration, and works such as Venere of 1921-1923 (Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Turin) and Solitudine (Solitude) (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome), with their contained, geometric forms, bear some kinship to the neoclassicism evident in works produced at the same time by Picasso. Toward the end of the 1920s, his style became more painterly. Through all of his stylistic developments, Sironi's was always a somber and dramatic vision, characterized by blocky forms, stark oppositions of light and shadow, and a generally pessimistic air.

A supporter of Mussolini, he contributed a large number of cartoons—over 1700 in all—to Il Popolo d'Italia and La Rivista Illustrata del Popola d'Italia, the Fascist newspapers.[2] Rejecting the art market and the concept of the easel painting, he became committed to the ideal of a fusion of decoration and architecture, as exemplified by Gothic cathedrals. He felt that the mural was the proper basis of a popular national art.[3] The state commissioned from him several large-scale decorative works in the 1930s, such as the mural L'Italia fra le arti e le scienze (Italy Between the Arts and Sciences) of 1935. Although his esthetic of brutal monumentality represented the dominant style of Italian Fascism, his work was attacked by right-wing critics for its lack of overt ideological content.[4]

As an artist closely identified with Fascism, his reputation declined dramatically in the post-World War II period. Embittered by the course of events, he also suffered the loss of his daughter Rossana by suicide in 1948. He had returned to easel painting in 1943, and worked now in relative isolation. The paintings of his later years sometimes approach abstraction, resembling assemblages of archaeological fragments, or juxtaposed sketches. He continued working until shortly before his death in 1961 in Milan.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Baldacci, 1989, p. 99
  2. ^ Cowling and Mundy, 1990, p. 241
  3. ^ Baldacci, 1989, pp. 22-23
  4. ^ Cowling and Mundy, 1990, pp. 247-248

[edit] References

  • Baldacci, Paolo, et al. (1989). Mario Sironi. Milano: P. Daverio. OCLC 21293509
  • Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930. London: Tate Gallery. ISBN 1-85437-043-X