AUTHOR: SALVATORE FIUME
TECHNIQUE: SCREEN PRINTING ON CANVAS
FORMAT: 54x75cm
EXAMPLE: R /Z
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Biographical notes on the artist
SALVATORE RIVER
Born in Comiso in Sicily on October 23, 1915, Salvatore Fiume was a painter, sculptor, architect, writer and set designer. At sixteen he won a scholarship for the Royal Institute for Book Illustration of Urbino where he acquired a deep knowledge of printing techniques: lithography, screen printing, etching and xylography. In 1936, having finished his studies, he went to Milan where he met artists and intellectuals including Dino Buzzati And Salvatore Quasimodo (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959) with whom he became friends.
In 1938 he moved to Ivrea, at the Olivetti , as art director of a cultural magazine particularly dear to the president, Adriano Olivetti, in which prestigious intellectuals such as Franco Fortini and Leonardo Sinisgalli collaborated. Though intending to establish himself as a painter, Fiume achieved his first success with a literary work, the autobiographical novel Long live Gioconda! , published in 1943 by the Bianchi-Giovini publisher of Milan.
In order to be able to devote himself completely to painting, in 1946 he left Olivetti and settled in Canzo, near Como, where he adapted a huge 19th-century spinning mill into a studio which from 1952 became his permanent residence (now it is the headquarters of the Salvatore Fiume Foundation ). In 1948, as his painting, strongly influenced by the Italian fifteenth century and by the metaphysical painting of de Chirico, Savinio and Carrà, struggled to establish itself, he painted and successfully exhibited at the Gussoni Gallery in Milan a series of paintings inspired by Spanish tradition and folklore by signing them Francisco Queyo , a non-existent gypsy painter whose story of a persecuted political exile in Paris he invented.
1949 was instead the year of his first official exhibition, again in Milan, at the Galleria Borromini, where his Islands of statues And City of statues aroused much interest among critics. During the Borromini exhibition, the director of the Collections of the MoMA in New York, Alfred H. Barr Jr, bought the City of statues of 1947 which is now at MoMA , while the Jucker collection in Milan acquired a painting exhibited in that same exhibition. In 1950 it was Alberto Savinio, brother of Giorgio de Chirico, who favored his participation in the Venice Biennial where he exhibited the triptych Island of statues (now in the Vatican Museums) which earned him an entire page in the American magazine "Life".
Fiume's first experience in scenography dates back to 1952, again at the suggestion of Alberto Savinio. In that year he performed for the Teatro alla Scala the sketches for the sets and costumes for The short life by De Falla and for The Creatures of Prometheus by Beethoven. They followed Medea by Cherubini (1953), The flame by Respighi (1954), Norm by Bellini (1955), the Nabucco by Verdi (1958) and the William Tell by Rossini (1965). He then collaborated with other important theatres, such as Covent Garden in London ( Aida by Verdi, 1957), the Rome Opera House ( Medea , 1954), the Teatro Massimo in Palermo ( The Capulets and the Montagues by Bellini, 1954) and the Monte Carlo Opera House ( The bell by Donizetti, 1992), with which he concluded his collaboration with the opera house.
In 1951 the illustrious architect Gio Ponti commissioned a huge painting (3 meters x 48 meters) from him for the first-class salon of the transatlantic Andrea Doria . Fiume represented an imaginary Italian Renaissance city full of masterpieces of art from various historical periods so that travelers could get an idea of the masterpieces they would admire in our country. Unfortunately, in 1956 the immense canvas was lost in the sinking of the ship off the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts.
In 1953 the magazines “Life” And “Time” commissioned him, for their New York offices, a series of works depicting an imaginary history of Manhattan and the New York Bay, which Fiume reinvented as Islands of statues .
Between 1949 and 1952, at the invitation of the industrialist Bruno Buitoni Sr, Fiume completed a cycle of ten large paintings on the theme of the "Adventures, misfortunes and glories" of ancient Umbria, in which the lesson of Italian masters of the fifteenth century is evident such as Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello. The paintings, donated by the Buitoni family to the Umbria Region in 1988, are kept in Perugia in the River Room Of Palazzo Donini , open to the public.
In 1962 a traveling exhibition took one hundred paintings by Fiume to various German museums touching, among others, the cities of Cologne and Regensburg. In 1967 he made the sketch for the large mosaic in the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth in the Holy Land. In 1973, accompanied by his photographer friend Walter Mori, Fiume went to Ethiopia, in the Valley of Babel , where he painted his Islands on a group of rocks using marine paints.
For the great anthological exhibition of 1974 al Royal Palace of Milan Fiume made a life-size reproduction in polystyrene of a part of the rocks painted in Ethiopia, almost entirely occupying the enormous Hall of the Caryatids. On the same occasion he presented for the first time the African Mona Lisa , now in the Vatican Museums, a tribute to African female beauty inspired by Leonardo's Mona Lisa. In 1975 the Calabrian town of Fiumefreddo Bruzio he enthusiastically welcomed Fiume's proposal to revitalize its historic center free of charge with some of his works. Thus, in 1975-76 he painted some internal and external walls of the ancient castle and, in '76, the dome of the Chapel of San Rocco.
His first exhibition as a sculptor was in 1976 at the Galleria l'Isola in Milan. His production also includes large-scale works, such as the bronze statue al European Parliament in Strasbourg , the sculptures of the San Raffaele hospital of Milan and Rome, the bronze group for the Wine Fountain in Marsala and two bronzes al Portofino Park Museum . In 1995 the Centro Allende of La Spezia hosted his last sculpture exhibition in its open spaces. In 1985 he held a large painting exhibition at Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. The exhibition dates back to 1987 De Architecture Pingendi at the Sporting d'Hiver in Montecarlo, inaugurated by Prince Rainier of Monaco. In 1991 he exhibited his architectural projects at the International Architecture Exhibition in Milan, at the Palazzo della Triennial , and in 1992 he exhibited his paintings at Villa Medici , headquarters of the French Academy in Rome.
In 1993 Fiume visited Gauguin's places in Polynesia and, in homage to the great French master, donated a painting to the Gauguin Museum of Papeari in Tahiti. In addition to the novel Long live Gioconda! , which met with considerable critical acclaim, Fiume published numerous short stories, nine comedies, one tragedy and two collections of poetry. In 1988 the University of Palermo awarded him the degree ad honorem in Modern Letters.
His works can be found in some of the most important museums in the world such as the Vatican Museums, the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, the MoMA in New York, the Pushkin Museum of Moscow and the Modern Art Gallery of Milan. Since 1978 i Vatican museums host a collection of 33 of his works, which summarizes most of the main themes of his production.
Fiume died in Milan on 3 June 1997. Among the exhibitions on the work of Salvatore Fiume held starting from 1997, the one at the Galleria Artesanterasmo in Milan entitled The pictorial alliances of '97, the anthology in the castle of Gualtieri, Reggio Emilia, of '98, the exhibition of portraits The body and the soul of '99, again at the Artesanterasmo of Milan, the one of 2001 in the Municipality of Canzo, where Fiume lived since 1946, entitled Salvatore Fiume: Myths Hypothesis Metaphors , the two exhibitions in 2006, in Vilnius, and in Warsaw at the respective Italian Cultural Institutes. From 2007-2008 is the great retrospective (207 works) at the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Arezzo , for the tenth anniversary of his death, and in 2008, the one entitled Myth and classicism on the threshold of metaphysics , at the Auditorium-Parco della Musica From Rome.
From December 2010 to February 2011 the Oberdan space of Milan hosted the exhibition Salvatore Fiume: a nonconformist of the twentieth century (100 works including paintings, drawings and sculptures). The exhibition dates back to October 2012 The Identities of Salvatore Fiume, 50 Works from the 1940s to the 1990s to Pirelli Palace , Milan. The municipality of Varese bought one of his sculptures which was placed in 2012 in the Court Square. Between 2012 and 2013, Salvatore Fiume's sons donated eleven large-scale works to the Lombardy Region, which hosts them in the River space inside the new Palazzo Lombardia in Milan. Furthermore, one of his sculptures was placed in Milan Piedmont square on 23 October 2013, the day when Fiume would have turned 98.
His first exhibition as a sculptor was in 1976 at the Galleria l'Isola in Milan. His production also includes large-scale works, such as the bronze statue al European Parliament in Strasbourg, the sculptures of the San Raffaele hospital of Milan and Rome, the bronze group for the Wine Fountain in Marsala and two bronzes al Portofino Park Museum. In 1995 the Centro Allende of La Spezia hosted his last sculpture exhibition in its open spaces. In 1985 he held a large painting exhibition at Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. The exhibition dates back to 1987 De Architecture Pingendi at the Sporting d'Hiver in Montecarlo, inaugurated by Prince Rainier of Monaco. In 1991 he exhibited his architectural projects at the International Architecture Exhibition in Milan, at the Palazzo della Triennial, and in