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SILVER Seller in Milano, Italy
The sheet comes from the volume edited by Giampiero Giani, Aligi Sassu, pittore with a text by the critic Luciano Anceschi. The edition, numbered 150 copies, was published by Stabilimento Grafico SA, without any indication of the year, but it should be dated 1940 because a copy dedicated by Sassu to Cesare Zavattini dated 13 March 1941 was on the market. The edition also included a black and white woodcut of a horse's face. Giampiero Giani, gallery owner, typographer, publisher, essayist and art critic, was the founder of Edizioni della Conchiglia, an instigator of collaboration between poets and artists, and printed numerous prestigious illustrated editions. This print deals with a subject so dear to the artist, horses. Near a lake or a river one can glimpse on the left the bodies of two splendid and majestic horses, lying on the ground with their jaws open almost in a cry of pain. The sky is dark and furrowed by two birds, in the background two bare trees. The powerful chiaroscuro effects intensify the pathos and suffering, and the horse skull on the left contrasts with the nature of the scene. Perhaps it is a post-war landscape, or at least a pretext for providing proof of graphic skill, rendering of atmospheres and knowledge of wildlife. Excellent impression. Very good condition, usual vertical central fold. Signed in the lower right-hand corner of the plate and in pencil beyond the image. Italian painter and sculptor, son of the politician Antonio Sassu, one of the founders of the Italian Socialist Party and a friend of the painter Carlo Carrà. This friendship encouraged the young Sassu to visit the painting exhibitions of the most influential Italian artists with his father. At the age of nine, the family moved to Sardinia, a land that enraptured Aligi with its colours and animals, especially horses, so much so that it was recalled and remembered in many of his works. After three years, with his family, he returned to Milan where he came into contact with Futurist art. In 1925, due to family problems, he was forced to leave school and began to attend only evening classes. He worked as an apprentice in a lithographic workshop and as a helper in a mural decorator's shop. In 1928, after meeting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the father of Futurism, he was invited to take part in the Venice Biennale. In 1930 he held his first solo exhibition in Milan, which was favourably reviewed by his friend Carlo Carrà. He studied and got to know Picasso; in Paris he became interested in and studied in depth the paintings of 19th-century painters exhibited in the Louvre. In 1963, he moved to Spain to study the painting of that country, and his works were characterised by increasingly bright and vivid colours. He created several murals and exhibited in various countries around the world.
ID: 11318-1642452998-30561
