Aligi Sassu
Via Manzoni, 1952
Oil on canvas; 200 × 149.5 cm
ART
Aligi Sassu (Milan 1912 – Pollença 2000), painter and sculptor, was one of the leading figures of twentieth-century Italian art, from his youthful Futurism to Corrente. The Fondazione Aligi Sassu e Helenita Olivares in Lugano preserves his work and makes it known, with more than 360 works in its catalogue.
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Aligi Sassu, Via Manzoni, 1952, oil on canvas, 200 × 149.5 cm
© Archivio Aligi Sassu
The painting
Via Manzoni belongs to the moment when Sassu, after the war, turned again to the city as a place of collective life. It is not a view. The street is not built as a perspective space in which things are arranged in depth, but as a field of relationships: the figures, placed side by side and overlapping, fill the surface almost without leaving gaps. They are neither an indistinct mass nor a chorus. Each keeps its own gesture and its own gaze, but none becomes the protagonist. The historical meaning of the painting lies precisely in this balance between the individual and the community.
Colour does not fill the forms: it generates them. The scene is structured and gains its rhythm through the bright brushwork more than through drawing. Sassu thus takes up the lesson of his Caffè paintings of the 1930s, but carries it onto another level. There the public place was a closed interior, almost a waiting room. Here it is the street, open and crossed by people, where the social life of Milan during the reconstruction shows itself and at the same time reveals its fragility. The melancholy that, at the end of the 1920s, weighed on the deserted streets of his primitivist period has not disappeared: it has passed into the eyes of the figures.
The painting is therefore a document, but not in the sense of a chronicle. It is the form Sassu gives to his own present: the proof that figurative painting could still interpret modern life without giving up its autonomy. The work was shown at the 26th Venice Biennale in 1952.
From the critics
«The composition, brought to life by a multitude of characters who seem to sum up every human type, is in some ways linked to the depictions of the Caffè, both themes answering Sassu's wish to interpret the meaning of his own time, to tell fragments of reality, to let himself be drawn in by the motifs of everyday life.»
With these words Bonini (1984) describes a similar work from almost twenty years earlier, but the description also fits Via Manzoni.
Exhibitions
1952 · Venice, XXVI Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte.
1957 · Rome, Galleria Aureliana, Aligi Sassu.
1958 · Bologna, Galleria del Circolo di Cultura S.T.E.P., Sassu.
1968 · Brescia, Galleria d'arte del Cavalletto, Aligi Sassu. Mostra antologica.
1989 · Pienza, Palazzo Civico, Aligi Sassu. Dipinti e opere grafiche.
Bibliography
XXVI Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, exhibition catalogue (Venice, 1952), Venice 1952, p. 72, no. 14.
L. Anceschi, E. Emanuelli, R. Usiglio, Aligi Sassu, exhibition catalogue (Rome, Galleria Aureliana, 1957), Rome 1957, pl. 10.
R. Usiglio, Sassu, exhibition catalogue (Bologna, Galleria del Circolo di Cultura S.T.E.P., 1958), Bologna 1958.
C. Munari, Aligi Sassu, L'Arte, Milan 1963, pl. 25.
F. Passoni, Aligi Sassu. Mostra antologica, exhibition catalogue (Brescia, Galleria d'arte del Cavalletto, 1968), Brescia 1968, no. 31.
E. Carli, Aligi Sassu. Dipinti e opere grafiche, exhibition catalogue (Pienza, Palazzo Civico, 1989), Comune di Pienza, Pienza 1989, p. 15, no. 3.
A. Negri, Aligi Sassu, Ilisso Edizioni, Nuoro 1995, p. 172, no. 213.
D. Brignone, Aligi Sassu. Dipinti 1929-1997, Mondadori, Palermo 2010, p. 73.
M. Zattini, Mediterraneo, Il Vicolo, 2011, p. 75.
A. Negri, C. Pirovano, Sassu. Catalogo generale della pittura, vol. I, 1926-1962, Electa, Milan 2011-2012, p. 342, no. 13.
Aligi Sassu, Via Manzoni, 1952, oil on canvas, 200 × 149.5 cm
© Archivio Aligi Sassu
Aligi Sassu
© Archivio Aligi Sassu
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