The Great Masters of the Twentieth Century

Modern and Contemporary Art will return to auction on 5 July at Wannenes’ headquarters in Recalcati Palace, Milan. The catalogue features a selection of works ranging from the early 1900s, with some important artists and schools from the Italian scene and beyond, reaching up to the contemporary period, with high-quality pieces never before offered to the market from galleries and private collections.

Among the masterworks showcased in this auction is this 1960 canvas from the Revelations cycle: Homage to Kandinskij, Klee, Picasso and Osvaldo Licini by Tancredi (Feltre 1927 - Rome 1964), an excellent interpreter of Post-War Art who'd been described by Peggy Guggenheim as ‘the best Italian painter, from the Futurists onwards’. Pioneer of gestural painting, Tancredi expresses his poetics at best in this Homage offered at auction.

Also of great interest to collectors is the oil on canvas figured above, created in 1946 by Massimo Campigli (Berlin 1895 - St. Tropez 1971) and titled The Game of the Thread. The work perfectly encapsulates Campigli’s style, known for being ‘so ancient as to seem very modern’. The few colours used and the almost geometric shapes of his subjects give off the semblance of a fresco painting. The threads, characteristic of his productions, accentuate the many perspectives of the gaze, as does the use of twin figures that cause the viewer’s eye to quickly jump from one subject to another.

Among the exponents of Mechanical Art is Enrico Prampolini (Modena 1896 - Rome 1956) who is here represented with his Aerodynamic Nature, created circa 1932. The work testifies to a phase of advanced stylistic focus in his Futurist ideology, influenced by the international movements of Dadaism and Cubism that pushed him to experiment more with his style. His lyrical and spiritual vision, already seen in Mechanical Art, is again prominent in this aerial painting where he promotes a ‘cosmic idealism’ that pervades the spaces and landscapes he portrays.

A still life highlight is an oil on canvas Flower Vase by Filippo de Pisis (Ferrara, May 11, 1896 - Milan, April 2, 1956), which manages to simultaneously express the lightness of touch and visual intensity typical of his works. Here, a certain intimate vitality of objects seems to be represented with minimalist features, as the artist almost barely touches the canvas with quick and light brushstrokes.

The story goes that Filippo de Pisis and Giorgio De Chirico (Flight 1888 - Rome 1978) met at the military hospital of Villa del Seminario in Ferrara in 1915, a place where the famous artist first understood how metaphysics would come to populate his pictorial expression. His artistic orientation is excellently represented in The Disquieting Muses, one of the most iconic paintings of his output precisely because it is capable of evoking that silent magic linked to dreams and memories which, through a language of symbolic stratifications, is placed both within and beyond reality. 

Among the international names we find Bahman Mohasses (Iran 1931 - Rome 2010), a legend of Iranian Modern Art who took voluntary exile to Rome. At the height of his career in the 1970s, the painter and sculptor decided to retire to private life, isolating himself from the art scene and from his native country. At some point, it seemed that no one knew anything about him anymore, yet his art has made an indelible mark on Iranian culture. What remains today of his creative legacy is keenly sought after by international collectors, who will be able to enrich their collections with two of his works offered at this auction. The Untitled canvas from 1980 comes from the Minotaurs series and represents the conceptual core of his human vision and artistic expression. The bronze sculpture Leda and the Swan from 1979 pictures ephemeral figures dancing in the space that surrounds them.

An example of the best art from the 1970s, more precisely from 1971, is this Polytype by Alberto Biasi (Padua, 2 June 1937). The theme of the Polytypes has been explored several times by the artist and is characterised by the inclusion of forms and colours of strong figurative power. Through skilful use of plastic and two-dimensional painted elements, Biasi gives life to highly evocative images that move and change by interacting with the viewer in a vortex of ever-changing sensations. The work in PVC on wood embodies the optical-kinetic research that the artist has been studying for more than twenty years, out of which a large number of compositions have been created with ever-changing shapes.

Equally significant is the painting titled Triumph of the Road by Ottone Rosai (Florence, April 28, 1895 - Ivrea, May 13, 1957), created in 1952. The work reflects the artist's attention to 15th-century Tuscan painting which, starting from the 1920s, would lead him to the creation of canvases depicting daily life in the narrow Florentine alleys and beyond, with isolated streets and houses in a silently metaphysical fashion. The Untitled canvas by Oscar Zalameda (Philippines 1930 - 2010), created in the early 1960s, and the 1955 panel Dramatic Situations by Mario Nigro (Pistoia 1917 - Livorno 1992) also bring forward this quiet metaphysics, not in descriptive but in universal terms, giving life to works capable of interpreting the drama of contemporary existence, which is here made up of continuous relations and limitless space.

Last but not least, two works by Giuseppe Capogrossi (Rome, 7 March 1900 - Rome, 9 October 1972) will be offered to collectors. The first is Surface 718, oil on canvas from 1950-51: a work that represents one of the first examples of the artist’s transition from figurative to abstract painting. The second is Surface G.25, a work from 1965 made with collage on marbled paper. The paintings showcase the artist’s full stylistic maturity, when he had definitively moved away from figuration in favour of a ‘morpheme’: a language concentrated around the use of the same sign multiplied and combined in new configurations, in a few colour combinations. 

You can admire these and other extraordinary lots from Wannenes’ catalogue on Barnebys.