GIUSEPPE SANTOMASO

This work is registered in the Archivio Giuseppe Santomaso, Galleria Blu, Milan, under number: sot /1605. We thank Galleria Blu for their support.

Provenance: By descent to the present owner, privately owned Switzerland.

While at the beginning of the 20th century the avant-garde artistic movements were still associated with specific countries (Expressionism - Germany; Cubism - France; Futurism – Italy; etc), the Abstract Art movement after 1945 was noted for its international character. Although emanating from Paris, with Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu and others, Abstract Art spread at an incredible pace, independent of national boundaries. As well as the fact that from the 1950s the world had become smaller, thanks to the media and the growth in tourism, it was especially the case that, “the vocabulary of abstraction […] was taken up by many artists of almost every country as a message of salvation.” (cit.: Walther, Ingo (Ed.): Kunst des 20. Jahrhundert. Teil 1. Malerei, Cologne 2000, p. 239). Italy too was caught up in this wave and influenced the development of abstraction through artists such as Piero Dorazio, Afro, Renato Birolli, Emilio Vedova and Giuseppe Santomaso, with two of his works being offered here at auction.

Born in Venice in 1907, Santomaso spent his entire life, with a few breaks, in his home city. In 1932 he began his studies at the Art Academy in Venice, and just 2 years later he exhibited at the Biennale, where he would participate 13 times in total. He began to be interested in the avant-garde. Initially inspired by the art journal VERVE, from 1937 he travelled first to The Netherlands and then to Paris, in order to see the work of the Impressionists and Expressionists in the original. In 1939 he exhibited for the first time in Paris at the Galerie Rive Gauche. After World War II Santomaso was one of the founder members of the artist group “Nuova Secessione Artistica Italian”, in which he endeavoured to find a synthesis between abstraction and realism, which was unsuccessful in the end, however. In the mid 1950s he turned to Informel Art, which we can see most effectively in the two works presented here. In the 1970s he incorporated increasingly architectural or constructive elements in his works. He taught at the Art Academy in Venice until his death. Alongside his numerous appearances at the Biennale, he was invited three times to the documenta in Kassel and had numerous exhibitions in international museums.

Giuseppe Santomaso’s works of the 1960s and 70s are abstract landscapes in which the colour palette is influenced by the light of Venice and the composition by the architecture of his home city. He sought a way into abstraction via an examination of nature, without losing that relationship to nature. Consequently, his work often strikes us as less radical and rather reticent, and yet it is always clear to the viewer that Santomaso’s point of departure is that of nature and lived experience, which makes our access to his work both more intense and at the same time simpler.