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Ardengo Soffici

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Ardengo Soffici
Ardengo Soffici

Ardengo Soffici (7 April 1879 – 19 August 1964) was an Italian writer, painter, poet, sculptor and intellectual.

Early life

Soffici was born in Rignano sull'Arno, near Florence. In 1893 his family moved to the latter city, where he studied at the Accademia from 1897 and later at the Scuola Libera del Nudo of the academy.

Career

Ardengo Soffici, 1912-13, Deconstruction of the Planes of a Lamp, oil on panel, 45 x 35 cm, Estorick Collection, London
Ardengo Soffici, 1912-13, Deconstruction of the Planes of a Lamp, oil on panel, 45 x 35 cm, Estorick Collection, London

In 1900 he moved from Florence to Paris,[1] where he lived for seven years and worked for Symbolist journals. While in Paris, during his time at the Bateau-Lavoir,[2] he became acquainted with Braque, Derain, Picasso, Juan Gris and Apollinaire.

On returning to Italy in 1907, Soffici settled in Poggio a Caiano in the countryside near Florence (where he lived for the rest of his life) and wrote articles on modern artists for the first issue of the political and cultural magazine La Voce.

In 1910 he organised an exhibition of Impressionist painting in Florence in association with La Voce, devoting an entire room to the sculptor Medardo Rosso.

In August 1911 he wrote an article in La Voce on Picasso and Braque, which probably influenced the Futurists in the direction of Cubism.[3] At this time Soffici considered Cubism to be an extension of the partial revolution of the Impressionists. In 1912-1913 Soffici painted in a Cubist style.

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Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km², making it the fourth-most populated city in the European Union as well as the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2022. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of the world's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, gastronomy, and science. For its leading role in the arts and sciences, as well as its very early system of street lighting, in the 19th century it became known as "the City of Light". Like London, prior to the Second World War, it was also sometimes called the capital of the world.

Symbolism (arts)

Symbolism (arts)

Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism.

Bateau-Lavoir

Bateau-Lavoir

The Bateau-Lavoir is the nickname of a building in the Montmartre district of the 18th arrondissement of Paris that is famous in art history as the residence and meeting place for a group of outstanding early 20th-century artists, men of letters, theatre people, and art dealers. It is located at No. 13 Rue Ravignan at Place Emile Goudeau, just below the Place du Tertre.

Juan Gris

Juan Gris

José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter born in Madrid who lived and worked in France for most of his active period. Closely connected to the innovative artistic genre Cubism, his works are among the movement's most distinctive.

Italy

Italy

Italy, officially the Italian Republic or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern and Western Europe. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, it consists of a peninsula delimited by the Alps and surrounded by several islands; its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical region. Italy shares land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. It has a territorial exclave in Switzerland, Campione. Italy covers an area of 301,230 km2 (116,310 sq mi), with a population of about 60 million. It is the third-most populous member state of the European Union, the sixth-most populous country in Europe, and the tenth-largest country in the continent by land area. Italy's capital and largest city is Rome.

Poggio a Caiano

Poggio a Caiano

Poggio a Caiano is a town and comune in the province of Prato, Tuscany region Italy. The town, birthplace of Philip Mazzei, lies 9 kilometres (6 mi) south of the provincial capital of Prato.

La Voce (magazine)

La Voce (magazine)

La Voce was an Italian weekly literary magazine which was published in Florence, Italy, between 1908 and 1916. The magazine is also one of the publications which contributed to the cultural basis of the early forms of Fascism.

Medardo Rosso

Medardo Rosso

Medardo Rosso was an Italian sculptor. He is considered, like his contemporary and admirer Auguste Rodin, to be an artist working in a post-Impressionist style.

Futurism

Futurism

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures included the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. Italian Futurism glorified modernity and according to its doctrine, aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. Important Futurist works included Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni's 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla's 1913–1914 painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913).

Cubism

Cubism

Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related artistic movements in music, literature, and architecture. In Cubist works of art, the subjects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form—instead of depicting objects from a single perspective, the artist depicts the subject from multiple perspectives to represent the subject in a greater context. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term cubism is broadly associated with a variety of artworks produced in Paris or near Paris (Puteaux) during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s.

Futurism

Caffè Giubbe Rosse
Caffè Giubbe Rosse

After visiting the Futurists' Exhibition of Free Art in Milan, he wrote a hostile review in La Voce. The leading Futurists Marinetti, Boccioni and Carrà, were so incensed by this that they immediately boarded a train for Florence and assaulted Soffici and his La Voce colleagues at the Caffè Giubbe Rosse.[4] Reviewing the Futurists' Paris exhibition of 1912 in his article Ancora del Futurismo (Futurism Again) he dismissed their rhetoric, publicity-seeking and their art, but granted that, despite its faults, Futurism was "a movement of renewal, and that is excellent".

Gino Severini was despatched from Milan to Florence to make peace with Soffici on behalf of the Futurists – the Peace of Florence, as Boccioni called it. After these diplomatic overtures, Soffici, together with Giovanni Papini, Aldo Palazzeschi and Italo Tavolato withdrew from La Voce in 1913 to form a new periodical, Lacerba, which would concentrate entirely on art and culture. Soffici published "Theory of the movement of plastic Futurism" in Lacerba, accepting that Futurism had reconciled what had previously seemed irreconcilable, Impressionism and Cubism. By its fifth issue Lacerba wholly supported the Futurists. Soffici's paintings in 1913 – e.g. Linee di una strada and Sintesi di una pesaggio autumnale – showed the influence of the Futurists in method and title and he exhibited with them.

In 1914, personal quarrels and artistic differences between the Milan Futurists and the Florence group around Soffici, Papini and Carlo Carrà, created a rift in Italian Futurism. The Florence group resented the dominance of Marinetti and Boccioni, whom they accused of trying to establish "an immobile church with an infallible creed", and each group dismissed the other as passéiste.

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Carlo Carrà

Carlo Carrà

Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter and a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.

Caffè Giubbe Rosse

Caffè Giubbe Rosse

Caffè Giubbe Rosse is a historical literary café in Piazza della Repubblica, Florence. When opened in 1896, the cafè was actually called "Fratelli Reininghaus". It was named "Giubbe Rosse" in 1910, after the red jackets which waiters used to wear every day.

Gino Severini

Gino Severini

Gino Severini was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. He was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War. During his career he worked in a variety of media, including mosaic and fresco. He showed his work at major exhibitions, including the Rome Quadrennial, and won art prizes from major institutions.

Giovanni Papini

Giovanni Papini

Giovanni Papini was an Italian journalist, essayist, novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher. A controversial literary figure of the early and mid-twentieth century, he was the earliest and most enthusiastic representative and promoter of Italian pragmatism. Papini was admired for his writing style and engaged in heated polemics. Involved with avant-garde movements such as futurism and post-decadentism, he moved from one political and philosophical position to another, always dissatisfied and uneasy: he converted from anti-clericalism and atheism to Catholicism, and went from convinced interventionism – before 1915 – to an aversion to war. In the 1930s, after moving from individualism to conservatism, he finally became a fascist, while maintaining an aversion to Nazism.

Aldo Palazzeschi

Aldo Palazzeschi

Aldo Palazzeschi was the pen name of Aldo Giurlani, an Italian novelist, poet, journalist and essayist.

Lacerba

Lacerba

Lacerba was an Italian literary journal based in Florence closely associated with the Futurist movement. It published many Futurist manifestos by Filippo Marinetti, Antonio Sant'Elia, and others.

Inter-war years

After serving in the First World War, Soffici married Maria Sdrigotti, whom he met in a publishing house in Udine, while editing Kobilek. They moved to Poggio a Caiano and had three children, Valeria, Sergio and Laura. Soffici created a distance from Futurism and, discovering a new reverence for Tuscan tradition, became associated with the "return to order" which manifested itself in the naturalistic landscapes which thereafter dominated his work. Remaining in Poggio a Caiano, he painted nature and traditional Tuscan scenes. There, he continued to write and paint and was visited by many artists, some of whom he helped in finding their place in the art world. In 1926, he discovered the young artist Quinto Martini when the latter visited Soffici's workshop with his work. In Martini's first experiments Soffici recognised the kind of genuine and intimate traits he was seeking and became his mentor.

In 1925, he signed the Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti in support of the regime, and in 1938 he gave support to Italy's racial laws.

Later life

When Mussolini was overthrown in Italy, he pledged loyalty to the Italian Social Republic with Mussolini as its head. He was a co-founder of Italia e Civilità, a war magazine that supported patriotism, Germany and the principles of Fascism.

At the end of the Second World War, Soffici was taken as a British POW and was imprisoned for several months in unhealthy conditions at an allied prison camp where he contracted pneumonia. During his stay at the prison camp, he met several other artists and writers who had also been accused of political support to fascism. Together, they wrote, painted and set up plays to pass the time in the squalid conditions they found themselves in. Some of the paintings were exchanged for food and art materials from the guards. Later, once released due to lack of evidence, he returned home and lived in Poggio a Caiano and spent his summers in Forte dei Marmi.

Death

The tomb in Poggio a Caiano cemetery
The tomb in Poggio a Caiano cemetery

Soffici continued to paint and write until his death in Forte dei Marmi on 12 August 1964. His last photo was taken a few days before his demise, holding his youngest granddaughter Marina.[5]

Source: "Ardengo Soffici", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2021, November 24th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardengo_Soffici.

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Bibliography

Poems

Novels

Essays

  • Il caso Rosso e l'impressionismo (1909)
  • Arthur Rimbaud (1911)
  • Cubismo e oltre (1913)
  • Cubismo e futurismo (1914)
  • Serra e Croce (1915)
  • Cubismo e futurismo (1919)
  • Scoperte e massacri (1919)
  • Primi principi di un'estetica futurista (1920)
  • Giovanni Fattori (1921)
  • Armando Spadini (1925)
  • Carlo Carrà (1928)
  • Periplo dell'arte (1928)
  • Medardo Rosso: 1858-1928 (1929)
  • Ugo Bernasconi (1934)
  • Apollinaire (1937)
  • Salti nel tempo (1938)
  • Selva: arte (1938)
  • Trenta artisti moderni italiani e stranieri (1950)
References and sources
References
  1. ^ "Estorick Collection". Archived from the original on 17 April 2009. Retrieved 21 January 2008.
  2. ^ "Montmartre". Paris Digest. 2018. Retrieved 11 August 2018.
  3. ^ Martin, Marianne W. Futurist Art and Theory, Hacker Art Books, New York, 1978, p.104
  4. ^ Martin, p.81
  5. ^ Laura Poggi Soffici
Sources

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