Giovanni March Biography
Giovanni March (Tunis, 1894 – Livorno, 1974) was an Italian painter. After his father's death he moved from Tunis to Livorno. Self-taught, he received good advice from the painter Ludovico Tommasi, with whom he came into contact in 1915, in Campolecciano, a town in the Livornesi Hills. In the 1920s he was noted for a series of exhibitions which brought him a certain national notoriety. These are the years in which he elaborates an art that moves from the stylistic modules of Mario Puccini without being imprisoned by them. In 1920 he was among the founders of the Labronico Group, in whose collective exhibitions he would regularly participate in the following years. In 1922 he exhibited with Primo Conti at the Fiorentina Primaverile. In 1923 he was at the Galleria La Vinciana in Milan, where he obtained the positive critical response of Carlo Carrà and the compliments of the painter Benvenuto Benvenuti. In 1926 he was at Bottega d'Arte, presented by Enrico Somaré. In 1927 he exhibited l'Esame di Milano at the Gallery with a presentation by Carlo Carrà. At that point he received invitations to exhibit abroad. In 1929 he was at the L'Artistique Gallery in Nice and at the XXXV Salon of the Society of Fine Arts in Nice. From 1930 he became the teacher of his friend Mario Borgiotti and followed his artistic apprenticeship for two years. In 1930 it was at the Bernheim Jeune Gallery in Paris. This experience inspired, in the same year, the exhibition at Bottega d'Arte in Livorno, where it was presented by Ettore Petrolini. In 1938 he became an assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. His painting takes on light shades over time, with the artist distributing the color over increasingly larger spaces. In 1956 he participated in the Fiorino Prize of Florence and in 1959 in the XIII Michetti Prize. In 1961 he won the National Painting Award for the city of Olbia. In the seventies his favorite theme was: still lifes with bottles, where references to the work of Giorgio Morandi seem evident. In 1966 he was present at the IX Quadrennial in Rome. He is considered one of the most modern artists among the founders of the Labronico Group, even if his work ended up having the same commercial position as that of the painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Clear, serene, spontaneous painting, born from an inner impetus of the artist, who starting from the language of the Tuscan Macchiaioli tradition, through its greatest exponents, arrives at developing an absolutely personal taste and technique. His skills began to grow as he dedicated himself to his passion as a self-taught artist, soon demonstrating a profound sense of observation and a certain coloristic control. After having relied, for his training, on Tuscan art and in particular on the masters of Livorno, he does not hesitate to abandon them in favor of new research, driven by his desire to continually renew himself. Thus, in his works we often find contents that we can define as typically Tuscan combined with a sometimes risky and innovative use of color. The divisionism of Plinio Nomellini was a lesson for him, but he combined this with a direct knowledge of contemporary French models, from which he was able to draw important ideas, while always remaining linked by an unconscious loyalty to the Tuscan lesson. Throughout his career his canvases were influenced by all the influences that he, never satisfied with the results achieved, seemed to seek even beyond the Italian borders. Landscapes with suspended atmospheres, with bright colours, but graduated with taste and wisdom, and still lifes recur, through which the artist's research is even more evident, regarding volumes of a geometric nature, modeled through colour, which are they refer to the Cézannian lesson.
