Arturo Martini Biography
Arturo Martini (Treviso, 11 August 1889 – Milan, 22 March 1947) was an Italian sculptor, painter, engraver and teacher. After training in Treviso and Venice as a goldsmith and ceramist (he collaborated in particular with the Fornace Guerra Gregorj), he had contacts with European culture (he studied for a few years in Munich and was in Paris in 1911), but he always remained linked to forms of traditional expression. In 1914 he was part of the Roman Secession and exhibited at the Futurist Exhibition. In the same years he collaborated with L'Eroica, an innovative woodcut magazine. In the twenties, adhering to Valori plastici, he overcame nineteenth-century naturalism by rediscovering and reviving the solemn humanity of our ancient sculpture. Despite his undoubted abilities, he struggled to be recognized for his value and had to endure severe economic difficulties. He was part of the Ca' Pesaro group of artists. In 1925 he was invited to exhibit with a room at the III Roman Biennale; in 1926 he participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time, after previous repeated refusals. In the same year he exhibited at the first Novecento exhibition and would also exhibit in the second edition of 1929. In 1929 he was called to the chair of Decorative Plastics at the ISIA in Monza and remained there until the following year: his Leda with the swan, a plaster sculpture , remained to enrich the collection of the Monza civic museums. In 1931 he received the prize for sculpture at the I Quadrennial in Rome; in 1932 he had a personal room at the Venice Biennale. From 1937 to 1939 he was involved in important public commissions in Milan. In 1941 he presented his first exhibition of paintings in Milan at the Barbaroux gallery. In 1942 he was called to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Martini was a very rich artist, who expressed himself with equal vigor in wood and stone, in clay and bronze. In works such as Il bevitore (1926), La pisana (1930), La sete (1934) and above all the Woman swimming under water (1942) he proceeded towards an ever greater freedom of expression, aware that statuary had had its day and that if culture wants to live, it must die in abstraction. Thus he wrote in Scultura lingua morta (1945), sensing the limit and crisis of his own art. Perhaps he could have overcome that limit if he had been more free to deepen his artistic language, but between the two wars, having become the official sculptor of the fascist regime, he was literally overwhelmed by commitments: large celebratory and monumental works for palaces of Justice, churches and university. Such as the large bronze at La Sapienza University of Rome. The envy of his success and the unjust accusations made the years immediately after the war bitter and the end that came to him in 1947, on 22 March, struck by cerebral palsy. But already in 1948, a posthumous tribute was paid to him at the V Quadrennial in Rome. During his stay in the capital, to get away from the chaotic life he preferred to live in the municipality of Anticoli Corrado, where he created the fountain named after him in the center of the Piazza delle Ville. The creativity of many of his students stems from his teachings, including Maria Lai da Ulassai, who based her entire career on the idea of rhythm imparted by the master, "a work of art is such when it gives back a breath, a full given by the emptiness it suggests". In 1967 the large monographic exhibition dedicated to the sculptor, set up based on a design by Carlo Scarpa in the Convent of Santa Maria in Treviso, spurred the administration to acquire the Santa Caterina Complex, today the main headquarters of the Civic Museums of Treviso. Numerous Italian schools are dedicated to him, including the state middle school of Santa Maria del Rovere in Treviso and the artistic high school of Savona. Arturo Martini's bond with the world of ceramics and clay processing was so strong that the artist managed to devise a new chalcographic engraving technique which he himself called keramography.
