Paintings Of Magical Architecture

"Shut away in a small attic, ice-cold the winter and suffocating the summer, I passed moments of perfect happiness with my colors and with my palette.  How did I love my occupation!” – Felice Casorati.

Having recently argued that the art of Vilhelm Hammershoi is about more than architecture, I now want to suggest that the varied works and styles of the Italian Felice Casorati  (1883-1963) are very much about architecture, although that is not what we see at first glance.

At times associated with the Metaphysical painters around Giorgio de Chirico, and at other times with the Magic Realist group Novocento, whose members included Giacomo Balla and Giorgio Morandi, Casorati's art has its own core of technique and interest.  Crystal clear purity of color and enigmatic subject matter are obvious. 

Le Signorine is modelled on Botticelli's Birth Of Venus (c.1482) but the story it tells is nothing like.  The nubile young woman, far from being welcomed by angels, is met with varying degrees of disapproval by a trio of older women representing polite society.

It was Lemons that got me to concentrate on the lines and angles that pervade Casorati's images.  The roundness of the fruit on the blue and white patterned napkin came first, but the image is intensifieded by the fanned newspapers with the blocks of type that echo the blocks of the napkin.  This idiosyncratic use of fruit appears to be the impetus for a whole series of still lifes over a period of years. Once you look at them this way, go back to Girl On A Red Carpet where the floral pattern of the carpet resolves itself into a series of geometric shapes, this time overlaid by blocks of sunlight. The girl is portrayed by a series of angles, too, with straight legs and crooked arms.

Along the way, Casorati absorbed other influences.  The son of a famous methematician father, he studied law (like so many future artists, to please his parents).  They might have guessed what was to come; as an adolescent, Felice Casorati devoted such energy to his music lessons that he collapsed from nervous exhaustion.  It was while taking a rest cure in Padua, that he began to paint in 1902, and by 1907, he had his first painting accepted by the Venice Biennial.  A room dedicated to Gustav Klimt at the 1910 Biennial inspired several images like this mother and child from 1917.  Typically, Casorati showed no inclination to hide his influences, seemingly confident in his ability to use them for his own purposes.  He borrowed the decorative aspects of the Vienna Secession without its nervous eroticism.

The artist often spoke of his admiration for the works of the 15th century Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, particularly their "atmosphere of immobility." Like Casorati's father, Piero della Francesca published works on mathematics and geometry.   In turn, Casorati performed his own experiments with perspective. 

By 1921, when Casorati painted The Woman and the Suit of Armour he was an influential member of Turin's intellectual circle.  He had founded an art school there that attracted many students and spent some time in prison for his anti-Fascist activities. The picture was certainly viewed by his contemporaries in light of Giorgio de Chirico's widely discussed essay We Metaphysicists, published in 1919  In the picture, a suit of armour straight out of the Futurist playbook looms behind a naked woman whose thoughts, metaphysical or otherwise, regard the unseen future with skepticism.

During the next decades, Casorati kept a low public profile, dismayed by the course of Italian politics.  In 1930, he married a former student and fellow artist, Daphne Maugham (1897-1982 and yes, the niece of writer Somerset Maugham) who had previously graduated from the Slade School of Art in London.  Casorati's portrait of Daphne continues his exploration of odd angles, the picture seemingly painted by a bird in mid-air.  Like his best-known portrait, of Silvana Cenna, it harks back to the Renaissance, even as its magically fractured picture planes and perspectives, and its carefully built up volumes that resolve themselves into a whole of modern flatness.

Images:
1. Girl On A Red Carpet, 1912, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent.
2. Le Signorine, 1912, Museo Ca' Pesaro, Venice.
3. Limoni (The Lemons), 1930, Collection of Mary Emlen Lowell Berkeley, Contessa di Berkeley.
4. Per se e suo ciel concepe e figlia, 1917, Palazzo di Monferrato, Alessandria.
5 The Woman, or The One Who Waits, 1918, private collection, Italy.
6. The Woman and the Suit of Armour, 1921, Galleria Civica d'arte moderna, Turin.
7. Daphne at Paravola, 1934, Galleria Civica d'arte moderna, Turin.
8. Portrait of Silvana Cenni, 1922.