As the inscriptions on the back of the paintings say, the 58 works were discovered in the master’s studio in via S. Leonardo in Florence, after the master’s death on 13th May 1957, in Ivrea (he was there for the opening of an exhibition of his work). Shown for some time in the Museo «Firenze Com’Era (the Florence Museum of ‘How It Was’)», his works have found a more suitable place among the other works of art of the century.
The collection is composed of three distinct groups of paintings which show the different artistic phases of the master’s life. The most substantial group, formed of thirty pieces, is a series of portraits of Rosai’s friends, undertaken between 1949 and 1955. With quick and incisive strokes, spontaneity, and a capacity for psychological study, Ottone Rosai portrays his friends most dearly, and gives life to a gallery of portraits which emulates the illustrious collections assembled by collectors in recent centuries. The private portraits record deep friendships that count amongst them famous men of letters, such as Giuseppe Ungaretti (1951), Carlo Bo (1955), Pietro Bigongiari (1955), and Romano Bilenchi (1955), and of art – Ardengo Soffici, 1949; Marino Mazzacurati, 1955; Aldo Calò, 1955; Bruno Rosai, 1955. In addition to these are portraits of photographers (Giuliano Betti, 1955; Castaldi, 1955), of a frame-maker (Corrado Del Conte, 1955), and of a doctor (Vittorio Rindi, 1955), which open unexpected glimpses into Rosai’s private world.
Similar principles seem to be at the base of the series of “tondini” (eighteen portraits, which are like minatures found in lockets) representing his friends who frequented, like him, the famous Florentine café of Giubbe Rosse. The faces of Elio Vittorini (1941), Eugenio Montale (1941), Giorgio De Chirico (1942), Mario Luzi (1941), and Gianfranco Contini (1941) appear, portraits which are able to evoke the lively cultural world which moved Rosai so. Carried out between 1939 and 1943, the ‘tondini,’ some of which today are in private collections, are an important testimony to the particular realism of Ottone Rosai, enriched by a strong expressive charge.
The painter achieved these results after having gone through a personal journey that, during the 1910’s, took him to approach futurism, and, later on, to a regaining of the traditional Tuscan painting similar to the works of Soffici and Carrà. An independent painter, a craftsman of a personal search wavering between the ‘avant-garde’ and the traditional, Rosai struggled for many years to be understood and appreciated by the public and by critics, reaching success only after many years of work.
Bound to the city of his birth, where he spent all his life and which the painter wanted to be the protagonist of his paintings, Rosai dedicated to Florence his most important work, a series of pieces undertaken between 1951 and 1954 known as «La Firenze di Rosai’» (‘The Florence of Rosai’). Some of these paintings form the last part of the collection, formed of ten large canvases featuring the most famous Florentine monuments. Some of these, the views of the churches of Carmine, of Santa Maria Novella and of Santa Maria del Fiore, all of 1954, are here as preliminary sketches as well as finished works, which allows one to follow the creative process of the artist.
The pieces from the so-called ‘white period,’ characterised by the prevalence of light and by sophisticated chromatic variations, concludes the work and the life of the artist. The forms are characterised by a strong geometrical simplicity, accentuated by tonal contrasts; the range of colours acquires at the same time a brightness never reached before in his previous works. The pureness of the forms harmonises with the calm and serene atmosphere, and, bereft of human presence, evokes certain architectural backgrounds of fifteenth-century Florentine painting.
The pieces of the ‘Donation of the Rosai Heirs’ collection offer, therefore, an important overview of the artistic journey of the master through the last twenty years of his painting, and, together with the group of youthful Rosai works of the Della Ragione collection, enable the visitor to easily follow the master’s artistic evolution.
Translation by Adam Rimmer
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