Fausto Pirandello Italian painter

(Rome 1899-1975)

Son of writer Luigi Pirandello and Antonietta Portolano.

Education

After completing classical studies, Fausto Pirandello decided to devote himself to art. His father suggested sculpture, but the young man focused on drawing instead.

Sigmund Lipinsky and the Deutsch-Romer Painters

Pirandello took classes with, and was profoundly influenced by, engraver Sigmund Lipinsky. The master introduced him to the graphic art of the Deutsch-Romer Painters whose unique painstaking rendering of anatomical details fascinated and even sometimes exasperated him.

In 1920 he attended the Scuola Libera del Nudo figure-drawing school.

The theme of the body: Bathers

For Fausto Pirandello the human body was central, and he used expressive drawing to portray it in his youthful self-portraits, while in the 1930s he began focusing more on color, especially for rendering skin tones.

In 1922 he began attending Felice Carena’s painting school in Rome and Anticoli Corrado.

His classmates included Emanuele Cavalli and Giuseppe Capogrossi.

He debuted at the III Biennale di Roma in 1925 with his work Bathers, a subject he returned to obsessively for the next 50 years.

In 1926 he showed at the first of several Venice Biennales, where for at least three decades critics would mention him as one of the most interesting and original artists.

Paris

In 1928 he went to Paris where he married Pompilia d’Aprile, a model from Anticoli Corrado, and their first son Pierluigi (1928-2018) was born that same year.

In Paris, Fausto Pirandello studied the paintings of the Italiens de Paris , the École de Paris, and the Surrealists. He was also dazzled by the art of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who influenced his most mature work.

Paris is where he came to terms with both art and modernity.

In 1929 he had his first solo show at the Galerie Vildrac 11 on the Rue de Seine in Paris.

While his still lifes and figures of those years mainly reflect the impact of Braque, they are also strongly individual.

The works are tonal, sensual, and dramatic with a sense of immateriality and spare, familiar subjects.

After a stop in Berlin and an exhibition at the Bakum Gallery in Vienna, he returned to Rome in 1930 where he joined the artists of the Rinnovamento (Renewal) who opposed “Novecentismo” (20th-century cultural tendencies).

Rome

Pirandello exhibited at the 1930 Sindacale d’Arte with his Interno di mattino (Morning Interior).

The following year he had his first solo show at the Galleria di Roma  curated by critic Pietro Maria Bardi.

In the ensuing years, he created some of his best works like Interno di mattino and Scala (Stairs), which was shown at the 1934 Venice Biennale and is now in the Gualino Collection.

At the 1935 Quadriennale, he had a solo show of 17 works.

The Roman School

Artistic maturity

In the mid-1930s, Fausto Pirandello reached a new maturity as an artist. He married the tonalism of the Roman School with an entirely personal approach to the figure and mixed references to classical painting (from Pompeii to the Early Renaissance) with the international 20th-century modernity of the great avant-garde artists.

In 1938 he exhibited a series of drawings at the Galleria della Cometa.

The war years 1939-1945

He spent the dark years of World War II between Anticoli Corrado and Rome, where he stayed at  Villa Medici. Despite the difficulties, it was a time of great inspiration for him.

During the postwar period, he was skeptical of the contemporary art movements coming from the United States.

In 1942 he showed at the Galleria di Roma and the Galleria Ettore Gian Ferrari in Milan.

Fausto Pirandello and the postwar period

He met art critic Lionello Venturi and showed at the Galleria Art Club.

His work became more coherent in its exploration of certain cubist art themes. His colors became more vibrant, his forms became more deconstructed and geometric, and the narrative became less important.

The 1950s were a period of fervent creativity for Fausto Pirandello.

He was in solo and group shows in Italy and abroad and Italian critics finally began to recognize his key role in contemporary art.

In 1951 the Palazzo Barberini in Rome held a show of his most important works. In 1955 and 1963 he had two important shows in New York City.

 

Failing to win a hoped-for award at the 1956 Biennale threw him into crisis, and for a time he forced himself to move into abstraction, though he never completely abandoned references to objective reality.

He gradually returned to figurative work in the 1960s, with an expressiveness that was now entirely personal.

Toward the end of his life, poor health forced him to gradually give up oil painting in favor of works on paper, especially pastels.

He died in Rome on November 30, 1975.

A year later, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome dedicated the first major retrospective to him.

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