Giovanni Riva Oil on Canvas Italy XX Century - Venetian glimpse

Nude of a Woman

Oil painting on canvas. Signed lower right. Istvan Mero was a Hungarian impressionist painter who trained first in Budapest, then in Paris and Munich. His pictorial production often proposes popular figurative subjects, such as this female portrait depicting a young naked woman caught between the sheets, ... reading a newspaper, losing all erotic meaning to emphasize rather a moment of domestic intimacy. Restored and relined, the painting is presented in a contemporary frame with small lacks.

River Landscape

Oil on hardboard. Signed lower left. Painter, sculptor and architect, Carlo Bonomi, after training at the Brera Academy, opened a studio in Milan together with Carlo Carrà, Giannino Castiglioni and Barilli. His painting is characterized by bright colors - yellow, red and burnt - spread with material substance, as if he sensed a third dimension in painting. He has created works of monumental size, full of figures, seen in their everyday life: humble and industrious people, with deep religious and human motivations. He has never forgotten, on the contrary, he has rather exalted his popular extraction. In this work the artist proposes a large countryside landscape where a river flows, perhaps the Ticino of the places inhabited by the artist: unlike many of his other works, the colors, which prefer the ranges of green, yellow and blue, are spread with broad brushstrokes in soft shades, without contrasts. The work is framed.

Les Bouches de Naples gemissent de Terreur ou de Plaisir 1969

Ink on paper. Signature, date and title below. Accompanied by authentication on photo from Galleria Giò Marconi in Milan and stamp from private archive. It is the drawing of the young artist who soon became one of the most important exponents of world surrealism, who was a poet and painter, but also a filmmaker, art and film critic, photographer and humorous designer. Born in the north of France, in 1927 he settled in Paris, where he came into contact with a group of young poets and philosophers, with whom he founded the '' Grand Jeu '' movement: play is understood as an art of living. Since 1928 he has collaborated with texts, poems and drawings for the movement's magazine and in the meantime he collaborates as an editor and reporter with various Parisian newspapers.In 1932, having exhausted the experience of the `` Grand Jeu '', he passes to the surrealist movement, collaborating on its publications and participating in its exhibitions. His humor turns towards the unusual and cruelty, more and more derisive of the absurdity of everyday life, of the tragic side of common existence, to which the spirit and the unconscious rebel, trying to access the unobservable. Knows Salvador Dalí. In 1939 he also began his activity as a filmmaker. In 1941 his first personal exhibition took place in Paris: the first buyer was Pablo Picasso. Participate in all surrealist exhibitions, including the 1947 international one in Paris. In 1951, for reasons relating to the internal discipline of the group, he abandoned the surrealist movement with others, while continuing to practice its poetics. In 1955 he also became passionate about photography. Since 1968 he has devoted himself almost exclusively to painting, abandoning the activity of humorous draftsman. In the same year he settled permanently in Milan: in Italy he exhibited in various personal exhibitions, those in Milan at the Galleria Marconi. The work presented here, an early drawing, comes from an important Milanese private collection. It is presented in a frame.

Madonna with Child

Oil on plywood. Signed lower right. Born in Milan and trained at the Brera Academy, Giuseppe Ghiringhelli exhibited for the first time in 1900 at the Milan Triennale, and subsequently participated in numerous national exhibitions. He devoted himself mainly to landscape and portrait, but in his production there are also several representations of the sacred Motherhood, depicted, as in this one proposed here, with intense luministic effects and permeated with tenderness and intimacy. The work is presented in a contemporary frame.

Composition with Hourglass Armor and Books

Oil on the table. Signed lower right. Born in Milan in 1913 and trained at the Brera Academy (of which he will later become a teacher), Adriano Gajoni became passionate about the study of seventeenth-century Lombard painters and Dutch and Flemish painting of the seventeenth century, from whose meticulous realism he let himself be inspired. Of strict figurative observance, Gajoni preferred landscapes, portraits and above all still lifes, which he expressed in fairy-tale and allegorical compositions. He mainly practiced oil painting on wood and hardboard. This composition proposes an armor, placed on a table together with some illuminated texts and an hourglass. The taste for ancient flavor compositions is rediscovered. In frame.

The Country Road

Oil on hardboard. Signed lower left. Having moved as a child with his family to Milan in 1898, still very young, Raoul Viviani enrolled at the Brera Academy, where he studied under the guidance of Giuseppe Mentessi (1857-1931). At the same time he attended the nude school of the Artistic Family, with which he exhibited for the first time at the age of 17, immediately enjoying great success with the public and critics, as a landscape painter with a strong personality and modernity and for his highly original style characterized from strong chromatic experiments. In 1912 he participated in the Venice Biennale and subsequently participated in numerous national and international exhibitions. From 1926 he began his career in the field of art criticism, writing for various newspapers, but his opposition to fascism led him to choose voluntary exile: in 1931 he moved to Uruguay, where he founded and directed the Academy of Montevideo Fine Arts. Returning to Milan in 1937, he resumed his activity as a painter and as a critic. In the 1950s he moved to Rapallo for health reasons and remained there until his death. Extremely original landscape painter, who engages in oil painting but also in watercolor and engraving, is very close to pointillist painting, however, developing his own personal technique, characterized by very thin filaments of color in the form of thin commas, which define the structures of the its landscapes. With his transfer to Liguria, the Ligurian landscape becomes the protagonist of his works and also his mute technique, moving away from the original pointillism to open up to a broad and summary brushstroke, which finally leads to a production of still lifes from violent and contrasting colors. In this work in which the technical characteristic of Viviani is well appreciated, along the country path that runs along the canal, a figure of a woman appears, which constitutes an exception in his production, usually lacking in figurative elements. Work in frame.

Male face

Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. The Milanese artist Carlo Jacono was an illustrator and painter: his unmistakable style, the mastery in the execution, the prolificacy and artistic ability in over 50 years of career, the knowing how to lend himself to different genres and the great success at readers and publishers made him one of the masters of Italian illustration and one of the most appreciated and well-known names on the national and international illustration scene. He was also known as the "Man of the circle", a pseudonym due to the layout of many of his covers in pink, police, science fiction, Italian, English, Swedish, Norwegian, American (we recall, among many, the covers of the series "Il giallo Mondadori "), or more simply with the surname only, Jacono, with which he signed himself. Starting from 1970 Jacono also embarked on a career as a painter, exhibiting in personal exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, preferring a figurative vein with a romantic connotation that finds its masterpiece in the series of "The warriors". They said of this production: "they are apparitions of warriors of other times, which the imagination comes to realize even in the minute features of the face, and to imagine in the most reckless actions". Probably the painting presented here is also part of this series: it is the face of a Nordic warrior, as can be deduced from the fur headdress that frames the proud and concentrated face in which the cold blue eyes stand out, and from the burnished metal collar engraved with signs graphics that refer to the Nordic runes; half-length, the shoulder straps of the armor can be seen. The painting is presented in a frame.

Portrait of Dr. Libero Mazza 1972

Oil on canvas. Signed and dated lower left. On the back the handwritten "Portrait of Dr. Libero Mazza, prefect of Milan, made in my studio", followed by the artist's further signature and the date. Venetian but Milanese by adoption, Attilio Melo studied at the Brera Academy and together with his father, an appreciated fresco painter. From an early age he established himself as a portraitist; in his long and brilliant career, figures of national and international fame posed for him, from different worlds: politicians (such as De Gasperi, Gronchi) and religious (Cardinal Martini), artists from the world of entertainment, music, theater (Ingrid Bergman, Frank Sinatra, Sophia Loren ....) and dance (Rudolf Nureyev). He was also a landscape painter, even of foreign places, but always favoring the landscape of his lands of origin and inspiration, Milan and Venice. His style is peculiar, made up of long brushstrokes, almost stripes of color, which create an evocative chromatic setting around the portrayed figures. The painting proposed here is presented in a contemporary frame.

Libeccio

Oil on table. Signed lower right. On the back, further signature, title and cartouche of the Galleria Dedalo in Milan. Giulio Cesare Vinzio, an artist of Livornese origin, artistically trained in Florence, attending the studio of Giovanni Fattori. In the countryside around Florence he begins to paint landscapes from life, with oxen, peasants, horses as protagonists, landscapes of the Maremma, rendered with bright colors and strong chromatic contrasts. From the beginning of the twentieth century, while exhibiting throughout Italy and abroad, he moved to Piedmont and approached pointillist painting: while continuing to prefer rural landscapes and bucolic realities, he represented them in the atmospheres of twilight, nocturnal, dawns, no longer made with broad brushstrokes, but small strokes divided between them. In 1921 he joined the Labronico Group, which brought him closer to the realist naturalism of the origins. The work presented here offers a glimpse of a Maremma beach, beaten by the libeccio, the wind that blows from the south across the Mediterranean. The technique is that of realism, using large and superimposed brush strokes. In frame.

Vase of Flowers 1956

Oil on plywood. Signed and dated lower left. The Piedmontese painter Emilio Vacchetti devoted himself mainly to flower arrangements in vases and landscapes, glimpses of the Piedmontese mountains. The work in warm and shaded colors is presented in a frame

Untitled, 1970

Oil on canvas. Signed and dated on the back. Eclectic and versatile artist. Libico Maraja was an illustrator and graphic designer of great importance, but also a painter considered among the best interpreters of Como's rationalism (his adopted city) and in part also of Futurism; her personal artistic research led her to create refined forms of abstract art. Work presented with frame.

Landscape With Steam 1910

Oil on cardboard. Signed at the bottom left. On the back there is another signature with date. The hilly landscape, crossed by a stream, is the work of the Larian artist Achille Zambelli, whose pictorial production can be found in several places in Como, the city where he lived and worked for years as a teacher at the Carducci Institute. In 1923, Zambelli painted a series of frescoes depicting the history of the animal and plant world at the Casartelli Science Museum in Como. In 1927, on the occasion of the "International Conference of Physicists", an event whose scientific sessions were held in Como in the halls of the Carducci Institute and which attracted the fathers of modern physics to the city, Zambelli decorated the walls of the Congress Hall - renamed the Nobel Hall - with medallions bearing the names of the Congress members. Framed painting.