Guglielmo Achille Cavellini Biography
Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, also known as GAC (Brescia, 11 September 1914 – Brescia, 20 November 1990), was an Italian artist and art collector. After his first artistic activity as a painter, in the 1940s and 1950s he became one of the major collectors of contemporary Italian abstract art, to the point of establishing a profound relationship of patronage and friendship with the protagonists of this movement, an experience which culminated in the famous exhibition Modern painters from Cavellini collection, set up at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome in 1957. Cavellini subsequently returned to his activity as an artist with works ranging from Dadaism to performance art to mail art, of which he became one of the main exponents with his Home exhibitions and Andata/ritorno works, and in 1971 he invented Self-historicization. He is also the author of the books Abstract art (1959), Painter man (1960), Diary of Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (1975), Encounters/clashes in the jungle of art (1977) and Life of a genius (1989). Guglielmo Achille Cavellini was born in Brescia on 11 September 1914. His parents were Tuscan, in fact they came from two small villages above Pontremoli, in Lunigiana. After their marriage and the birth of their daughter Adele (1900), they moved to Switzerland where their father worked as a bricklayer and later started a business as a street vendor in Lombardy. They lived for some time in Arona, on Lake Maggiore, where their second son Mario was born in 1911. Finally they decide to move to Brescia where they open a shop, Bazar 33, in via Mercanzie 45. In 1918 Adele dies due to the Spanish flu. Cavellini attended the Cesare Arici Jesuit college for nine years. At 16 he was admitted to the technical institute, but was forced to interrupt his studies to help his parents in the shop. Already during childhood he drew and painted, especially landscapes. At 22 he met Lisetta, his first girlfriend and future wife. At 25 he met the painter Domenico Mucci in Cortina d'Ampezzo, with whom he became a friend and who gave him drawing lessons. In 1941 he left for the war and was assigned to an anti-aircraft artillery group in Bergamo. On 11 August 1941 he married Lisetta and was later discharged from the army due to a gastric ulcer. On 10 September 1942 his daughter Mariella was born, Cavellini later resumed military service. Between 1945 and 1948 he drew and painted intensely. In the same period he visited the Feroldi collection, a very rich collection that includes Reclining Nude by Amedeo Modigliani, The Disturbing Muses by Giorgio de Chirico and works by Giorgio Morandi, Henri Rousseau, André Derain, Alfred Sisley and Paul Cézanne. In the same period he visited Venice, where he painted landscapes, and Burano, where he met the painter Filippo de Pisis. At the Procuratie Nuove he also met the artist Emilio Vedova, in front of Giorgione's Tempest. Vedova proposed that he organize an exhibition at his home in Brescia, also involving the painter Giuseppe Santomaso and the art critics Giuseppe Marchiori and Marco Valsecchi.
