Leonardo Cremonini Italy, 1925-2010

Leonardo Cremonini was born in Bologna on November 26th, 1925.

 

His father Luigi, a railway worker, paints since his youth and passes on his passion to his son. In 1936 the family moved to Paola, in Calabria, where the young Leonardo was able to discover southern Italy and the Mediterranean light, which will always be present in his paintings.

In 1941 he obtained a scholarship from the Venturoli College which allowed him to study for four years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where he attended the courses of Alfredo Protti, Farpi Vignoli, Luciano Minguzzi and Guglielmo Pizzirani, with whom he will have a profound friendship. In 1945, with the same scholarship, he enrolled at the Brera Academy in Milan, where he met and established a strong bond with the painter Karl Plattner and with Dario Fo, while his masters were Italo Valenti, Aldo Carpi and Aldo Salvadori. During this period he spent long stays on the Comacina Island, on Lake Como and established friendly relationships with various well-known personalities, such as Mario Sironi, Giò Ponti, Marco Valsecchi, Lamberto Vitali and Violetta Bisesti.

 

After his training, in 1950 he moved to Venice where he met Peggy Guggenheim, who provided him with a small studio, and where he frequented Virgilio Guidi and Giuseppe Marchiori. 1951 proved to be a pivotal year in the biography of the artist who went to Paris on a scholarship from the French government. His candidacy was supported in particular by the writer Elio Vittorini and the painter Mario Sironi. Cremonini settled in the French capital and frequents artistic circles, where he met the linguist Giovanna Madonia, his future companion, while he made long stays in Italy. Between 1951 and 1955 he stays in Forio on the island of Ischia, where he met Werner Henze, Carlyle Brown, Pavel Tchelitchev, Catherine Viviano and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who will take numerous portraits of him.

 

Starting from 1952, Cremonini exhibited almost exclusively at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York, even if he does not live there.

In this period the first significant change takes place in Cremonini’s painting, whose stylistic path can be broadly divided into three macro periods: the first academic phase, still linked to a clear realism and traditional figurative styles, the decade between 1952 and 1962, in which his painting is oriented towards more up-to-date solutions and a more stylized figuration, and the more mature phase that is defined between the sixties and the seventies and will continue until his death.

During the 1950s, his painting became more physical, material, leaving traces of brush and dripping on the canvas. At the same time there is a certain primitive monumentality and the search for a chromatic unity, based on variations of the same tone. However, the line is always present to define the forms, giving his works a Mediterranean nature.

In 1954, during one of his exhibitions in Rome, he met Francis Bacon with whom he became friends and who introduced him to Erica Brausen, who dedicated an exhibition to him at the Hanover Gallery in London.

In 1955 he settled permanently in Paris, where he took a home and studio with Giovanna Madonia in rue de Buci, a studio that he would keep until his death.

In 1956 he was in Douarnenez, in Finistère, where he met Georges Perros. The following year, the American art critic and future director of the MoMA's painting department, William Rubin, noted Cremonini and wrote one of the first in-depth articles on his work, which appeared in the magazine "Arts" in February 1957.

In 1957, unable to find a home in Ischia, already too trendy, he set out in search of an island and fell in love with Panarea, where he found several houses and offered them to his friends - Sebastian Matta, Anselmo Francesconi, Erica Brausen, Karl Plattner - who reached him, creating a privileged working community. He resided on the island until 1959, and since the 1960s he exhibited mainly in Europe, collaborating with the Galerie du Dragon since 1962. He continued to live in Paris, alternating business stays in Bertinoro, Procida, Bagheria, Sanlucar de Berrameda in Andalusia , Trouville in Normandy, Panarea and, starting from 1974, in the Florentine hills. Already in these years some fundamental friendships will be defined with writers and artists - Gino Severini, Balthus, Dacia Maraini, Henri Cartier-Bresson, to name just a few well-known names - which defined the intellectual and profound nature of Cremonini, who will always remained faithful to an individual path of figurative experimentation, far from the most well-known trends of the second half of the twentieth century.

 

Since 1960, in the context of the Algerian war that tears apart France, he painted some works in support of the Algerian cause and then dedicates himself from 1961 to new, more intimate subjects, such as women with a mirror on a Mediterranean background, which correspond to the beginning of a stylistic change that is as profound as it is fast. The colors are intensified, no longer playing on the shades, but on the contrast, more and more lively, sometimes acidic, and the compositions are organized according to a geometric structure made up of vertical and horizontal. Painting rests, life goes out and the subjects become suspended, linked to memory: the scenes are painted with realistic precision, but the atmosphere becomes melancholy, almost metaphysical. Half-open doors, long corridors, terraces overlooking a flat sea and desert, characters without personality, mirrors that reflect empty and distorted rooms, incongruous geometric elements, these will be the subjects of Cremonini’s painting for almost fifty years. His painting contains an encrypted language, which must be interpreted and seems to conceal an existential drama, which is why many illustrious names, from William Rubin to Umberto Eco, from Alberto Moravia to Italo Calvino, have written and shed light on his work. Suffice it to say that the philosopher Louis Althusser, in a 1966 article published in the magazine "Démocratie nouvelle", dedicated his only text on painting to Cremonini's art.

 

In 1963, his son Pietro, now an architect in Paris, was born from his relationship with the linguist Giovanna Madonia.

In 1964 he obtained a personal room during the XXXII edition of the Venice Biennale and in 1965 he received the San Marino Biennale Award and exhibited at the IX edition of the Rome Quadrennial.

Between 1969 and 1974 several monographic exhibitions were dedicated to him in the museums of Brussels, Prague, Basel, Lund, Bologna, Paris, Darmstadt and Strasbourg as well as at the Maisons de la Culture of Saint-Étienne, Grenoble, Amiens and Chambéry.

 

In 1972 he met the painter Roberta Crocioni, he travelled the world with her and together they bought a house in the hills of Florence in the Chianti region, they got married in 1990.

He alternated long stays between Paris, Panarea and Tuscany for the rest of his life.

In 1979 his first exhibition took place at the Galerie Claude Bernard, in Paris - the gallery dedicated ten solo exhibitions to him between 1979 and 2006 - and in that year Cremonini received the President of the Italian Republic’s Prize at the Academy of San Luca.

 

In 1980 a retrospective was dedicated to him at the Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo and since 1983 he has been Chef d’Atelier de Peinture at the École Nationale Superieure de Beaux Arts in Paris, a position he will hold until 1992.

In 1984 he was the guest of honor at the Spoleto Festival, which dedicated a retrospective to him, while in 1985 he was chosen to create the Drappellone awarded to the winner of the Palio di Siena in August of that year. In 1987 Skira published an important monograph dedicated to his paintings between 1953 and 1987, accompanied by texts on the artist by William Rubin, Pierre Emmanuel, Louis Althusser, Max Clarac Sérou, Michel Butor, Alberto Moravia, Pierre Gaudibert, Gilbert Lascault, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Geneviève Breerette, Alain Jouffroy, Marc Le Bot and Jacques Brosse.

In 1995 the SEITA Museum dedicated an exhibition to Cremonini’s small formats and watercolors, while in 2002 and 2003 two large retrospective exhibitions of his work are hosted respectively by the Permanente di Milano and the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna.

 

In the 2000s, Cremonini was president of the Academy of San Luca in Rome, Commander of Arts and Letters in France and a member of the Académie Royale de Belgique, of the Académie des Beaux-Arts at the Institut de France and of the Academy of the Fine Arts and Design of Florence. His last exhibition at the Galerie Claude Bernard took place in 2006, when he exhibited recent works, dated from 1999 to 2005. The great retrospective at the National Gallery in Prague was held in 2007, while in 2008 an exhibition dedicated to his early works from the 1940s took place in Legnano.

 

Finally, in 2010 two retrospectives were organized in Athens, one dedicated to paintings and one to drawings. Leonardo Cremonini died in Paris on April 12th.