Modern Watercolour Painting with 2 Young Dames Italy XX Century

Female Nude

Sanguine on paper. signed lower right. Celada, who loved to paint women both in portraiture and in his figure studies, proposes a female body, firm and classicizing both in forms and in references to the painting of the past. Celada';s painting is capable of blocking in time and space reality, in a way that appears detached, analytical and scientifically exact (colours, reflections, transparencies), but communicating - as opposed to a total unreality - a great narrative pathos. The work is presented in a frame.

Watercolor on paper. Signature L. Rossi at the bottom left. It is a quick portrait, in pencil and then watercoloured, of two young ladies in winter walking clothes, shot in almost full length. The drawing is presented in a gilded and carved frame from the late 19th century, which has several defects.

Ligurian Beach

Oil on canvas. Signed lower left. It is a glimpse of the Ligurian Riviera, near a cove, surmounted by houses close to the coast. Berto Ferrari, born and always lived in Liguria, was a skilled and sensitive marine and landscape painter of the post-impressionist tradition, who painted the beauties of the Ligurian Riviera and numerous views of the Apennine hinterland. The painting has drops of color and traces of restoration. It is in a coeval frame.

Landscape with Ancient Style Figures

Oil on hardboard. Signed lower right. Born in Milan in 1913, and trained at the Brera Academy (of which he later became 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. Also this painting proposes a landscape of ancient taste: in the countryside, on the path that runs along a wide river, a pastoral figure passes on his donkey, followed by his small herd. The work is presented in a style frame.

Duck Flight

Bronze sculpture. Signature engraved on the base. Gino Masciarelli, a sculptor originally from Abruzzo but who lived in the Milan area, after having also worked at the Experimental Center for Scientific Research “F. Marinotti” in Lombardy, dealing with high-frequency cinematographic shooting, learned to capture the instability of bodies in movement and the dissolution of matter in space in many of his works. In the sculptures "Human groups" and "Flight" - to which the work presented here belongs -, the dynamism of flight can be observed almost as if it were a photographic sequence. The artist himself said: "Only 8 seconds made an impression on 300 meters of film, the aim was to slow down what the human eye cannot see, I wanted to capture the movement and the projection of these seconds lasted a couple of hours".

The Woodcutter 1980

Oil on glass. On the lower left are the signature and date, accompanied by the artist's symbol, the stylised figurine of a man in a wheelchair. This is a work on glass by the painter Mario Previ, who has lived and painted in a wheelchair since the age of eighteen, due to quadriplegia following a plunge into his Taro river. He said of himself: ‘The world, the passage of time, from this point of view (the wheelchair) teaches you many things. You learn to wake up every morning with a purpose, even if your body is in pain, if every gesture generates suffering and you depend on others, and giving up could be an easy solution. And instead, art, painting, together with the serenity of my world, of friends, give me incredible energy. They have saved me, giving me the strength to live'. In 1974, three years after the accident, inspired by a television programme on Yugoslavian naïve painters, in particular by the works on glass by Mijo Kovacic, Previ began painting and learning the art of glass painting as a self-taught artist, until he became known and appreciated for his paintings. In his naifs, Mario Previ recounts a reality that has almost disappeared, real stories albeit in a fairy-tale tone, revives lost traditions, glimpses of life that belonged to other generations, those of the peasant civilisation (from which he comes), but what emerges most from his visions are the ‘forë’, those that could once be heard in the ‘firossi’, the traditional evenings in the hamlets of Parma dedicated to getting together to tell anecdotes, stories and historical curiosities, often in front of the fireplace, when it was cold and snowing outside. The work is presented in the frame.

Mixed technique on canvas. Signed lower right. The painting of Kodra, an Albanian painter trained artistically in Italy and active in the Milanese context, consists of a personal interpretation, of a fantastic kind, of Cubism, with the peculiarity that the decompositions typical of analytical cubism are proposed according to an approach of its own more than synthetic cubism. The seascape depicted here, with sailboats sailing close to a coast, is part of the later production, in which the native country is often evoked.

Print on paper. Rare anti-racist poster which, as indicated below, was published as a supplement to the magazine "MAI" of June '68, in the series "I manifesti di MAI di Giò" (Giorgio Tavaglione). It is a manifesto of the beat movements that spread in Italy in the years 1967-1968: thanks to the use of the mimeograph, which allowed the printing of numerous flyers, posters, poetic anthologies, small plaquettes and especially magazines, the young beatniks they created an alternative information channel that represented the primary vehicle for disseminating the principles that animated the beat movement, as opposed to the official cultural and communication circuits. Within the magazines, and in general in the various beat activities, poetic writing assumed an essential role as an integral part of the practice of dissent, since it represented one of the main forms of expression and affirmation of a different ideal of life, as well as of a different idea of collectivity. Giorgio Tavaglione was one of the best-known artistic exponents of the beat movement: as a complete self-taught Giò he designed the posters, flyers and covers of the first Italian underground magazines of the 1960s; disappeared for years after a trip to India, he subsequently reappeared as a draftsman of tarot cards and talismans in the creation of which he transferred his excellent graphic quality, his typical meticulous and imaginative, esoteric and visionary style. Work in frame.

Pair of Ink Drawings

Ink on paper. One of the two is signed on the lower right. The works of the Russian artist Vyacheslav Sawich Mikhailov are exhibited in prestigious museums such as the Tretyakov Gallery or the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, the National Museum of Russian Art, the Museum of Nonconformist Art in St. Petersburg. Considered an expressionist author, he creates scenes of intense drama with different techniques. The design proposed here is part of a series of scenes full of dramatically intertwined figures in contortions of the body, with allegorical elements and patches of often red color, evoking blood. In frame.

Landscape with Mill

Oil on cardboard. Signed lower right. Carlo Vittori, an artist from Cremona, mainly portrayed the landscapes of his Po Valley. Here he proposes a countryside inhabited by a mill, to which the water arrives through an overhead canalization. The painting is presented in chronicle.

Interior of Stable

Oil on hardboard. Signed lower right. The Cremonese painter Carl Vittori specialized in landscape views of his Po Valley lands or in scenes with animal figures, always linked to peasant life, like this stable interior inhabited by a donkey. The chromatic and luminous choices are suggestive. The work is presented in a frame.

Seated Figure

Oil on wooden board. Signed lower right. The painter Salvatore Sportelli, of Apulian origin but who lived for a long time in Lodi, where he taught (a posthumous exhibition of his was recently held in the city), produced numerous popular figures and genre scenes characterized by a look at post-impressionism. The work is presented in a frame.