PERICLE FAZZINIGrottammare, 1913 - Roma, 1987 Crouching Woman, 1959 Marker on paper, 46 x 33 cm Signed, inscribed and dated lower right: Pericle Fazzini, Roma, 1959BIOGRAPHY: Born in Grottammare, in the province of Ascoli Piceno, on May 4, 1913 by Vittorio and Maria. Very young, he began working in the family carpentry, alongside his numerous brothers, learning to carve wood and devoting himself to sculpture in his spare moments. Around 1929 the poet Mario Rivosecchi, a fellow countryman of Pericles and a family friend, convinces his father to indulge his precocious talent, sending him to study in Rome.Fazzini moved to Rome in 1930, starting to attend courses at the free school of the nude and to observe Baroque sculpture.Among his first friends we find the painter Alberto Ziveri, with whom he shared his first studies and some initial experiences (note the participation in the IV Triennale of Monza, 1930, where the two collaborated with the rationalist architect Luigi Moretti in the construction of the poet's house). In 1931 Fazzini won the competition for a monument to Cardinal Dusmet (never built, the sketch is in Catania, Palazzo degli Archives). His interests extend to modern sculpture: in his notes there are traces of a youthful admiration for Rodin, Bourdelle and Maillol. In 1932 with the bas-relief Exit from the ark he won the competition for the national artistic pensioner, which guaranteed for two years a decent monthly and the use of a study on the Capitol. It is the beginning of a very intense period of work whose first fruits appear in January 1933 in an exhibition at the gallery of Dario Sabatello, held together with Alberto Ziveri and Giuseppe Grassi. The exhibition has a remarkable critical success: it is compared for its impact on the Roman environment to that of Mafai and Scipione held three years earlier at the Galleria in Rome and gets favorable reviews from Piero Scarpa, Corrado Cagli, Alberto Neppi, Dario Sabatello. In February Fazzini exhibits again at the Circolo delle Arti, obtaining new critical feedback from Cipriano Efisio Oppo and Giuseppe Pensabene. His friendships expanded in the Roman environment: through Giuseppe Ungaretti he met Marguerite Caetani, princess of Bassiano and animator of the magazine "Commerce", who in 1934 invited him to participate in a group show in Paris (together with E.Vuillard, P-Bonnard, D. deSegonzac, A.Masson, C.Cagli) One of the three wooden sculptures sent (the Portrait of Anita) was purchased by the Musée Jeu de Paume. This period of success culminated in 1935 with the participation in the II Quadrennial of National Art: the two high-reliefs Danza and Tempesta aroused considerable emotion and obtained a prize of 10,000 lire. Although the artist's talent is expressed in these works with the utmost freedom of means, their energy also convinces critics of a traditionalist orientation such as Margherita Sarfatti and Emilio Cecchi: "Fazzini - writes the latter - makes his debut as the seventeen-year-old Michelangelo of the scuffle of centaurs, but on surfaces ten times as much "(in" Circoli ", Rome, 1935, III). After participating in the Art Italien des XIX et XX siècles exhibition (Paris, Jeu de Paume) and at the Littoriali dell'arte Fazzini, he receives an invitation to participate in the Venice Biennale, but unexpectedly the Pensionato Artistico decides not to renew his scholarship , thus putting him in front of serious economic difficulties.1935- 1943 "Moments of solitude"The years between 1935 and 1938 are quite difficult. With the money from the prize won at the four-year anniversary, the sculptor rented the studio in via Margutta where he worked for the rest of his life. He isolates himself from the Roman artistic environment, creating some of his greatest masterpieces in solitude, such as the Portrait of Ungaretti and the Dancer and participating in public exhibitions with works of lesser commitment, sometimes linked to the themes of propaganda to the regime. However, in 1938 he put an end to his isolation by participating in the Venice Biennale with a group of sculptures that affirmed him at the highest levels of European research: in addition to the Portrait of Ungaretti, the so-called Moments of solitude, two wooden figures representing a Young Man listen and a Young Man who declaims, made with an unusual formal politeness. They constitute the culmination of a research tenaciously pursued throughout the Thirties along the lines of Greek sculpture: from the archaism of the first expressions (see Portrait of Anita n.2, painted in wood like the ancient xoana) to to the classical completeness of Phidias and beyond, to the proportional elegance of Lysippos and to the compositional and dynamic freedom of Hellenism. A comparison made by Fazzini without the slightest sense of inferiority and without ever going into the quotation, but vice versa with a maximum of originality. In 1939, on the occasion of the II Quadrennial, this comparison extends to other models: the Passage of the Mareb, a bas-relief depicting a moment of the war in Ethiopia cannot fail to recall the tormented surfaces and the sense of historical drama of the Roman honorary columns, at a time when artists were called to confront an increasingly harsh political situation. It's time for "Corrente", the magazine founded in Milan to collect the energies and dissensions of young Italian art. Fazzini, with other Roman artists, participates in the second exhibition proposed by the movement, in December 1939 at the Galleria Grande in Milan. In January 1 940, always on the path of a still uncertain and nascent "realism" he took part in an important collective exhibition at the Galleria di Roma with R. Guttuso, V. Guzzi, L. Montanarini, O. Tamburi, A.Ziveriad. In June 1940 he married Anita Buy, the writer to whom he had long been associated, shortly after he left for military service, first reaching Padua, then Zara.In 1941-42 during his stay in the Dalmatian town he was able to continue working: many drawings were sent to the magazines "Primato", "Documento", "Domus", the writer Curzio Malaparte bought him the Danza relief to place it in the famous villa of Capri, but above all, Fazzini gives way to a production that will prove very fruitful in the years to come, that of "bronzetti", made with the ancient technique of "lost wax". He spent the last period of his military service in Viterbo, joined to the corps of paratroopers. Discharged on September 8, 1943, he returned to Rome, dedicating himself to an important sculpture that had just begun at the outbreak of the war: the Boy with the Seagulls. Made of wood with traces of color, it depicts a young man intent on collecting shells on the seashore, with some seagulls flying around him, a very difficult theme to render in sculpture, in which the human figure appears as the means to evoke light of summer, the air and the flight, the sound of the sea. Thinking of sculptures like this Ungaretti defined Fazzini "the sculptor of the wind", for his ability to suggest and represent the most ethereal and lyrical aspects of nature.The postwar period"After the war - remembers Fazzini - a new creative period began for me. I resumed the discourse interrupted with the Walking Figure, in which I had tried to create an absolute sculpture, a sublimation of the human figure beyond its sexuality. I finished the sculptures interrupted during war and then I dedicated myself to the creation of new forms: the point of arrival of my researches are the Sibyl and the Prophet, two symbols of man in his mystical and ascetic relationship with the universe, two figures that in their space summarize the anxiety and the promise of a new "kingdom of the spirit" (cf. Fazzini, catal., Rome I984, p.82). Even before the two sculptures mentioned by the artist, the shot was born, one of the most intense expressions figurative of the war drama that has just ended and one of the first Fazzinian creations in which a religious feeling of pain and human suffering emerges, a theme on which the artist will return frequently giving vent to a pessimistic, bitter side and clear of his character. In 1946 Fazzini exhibited at the Galleria del Secolo in Rome alongside A. Corpora, R. Guttuso, S.Monachesi, G.Turcato, with works created ten years earlier: it is the sign of a voluntary reunion with those experiences in the sign of formal synthesis with which he had begun his journey. In the same way, the victory at the Turin Prize of 1947 with a sculpture of 1939, Anita standing, and finally the participation in the first "exhibition of the new front of the arts" (June I947, Milan, Galleria della Spiga) alongside those artists (Leoncillo, N. Franchina, A. Corpora, E. Vedova, R. Guttuso etc.) who at the time proposed a linguistic research based on Cubist (or Neocubist) syntax as an attempt to reconnect the threads with European culture.Fazzini, well prepared for these researches since his youthful adhesion to the climate of architectural rationalism and from an innate propensity for the synthesis of form, drew useful lessons from it, arriving with the Sibyl (winner of the Saint Vincent Prize in 1949) and with the Prophet high quality. In 1950-51 he resumed his relationship with architecture by creating large figures of angels for the chapel of Santa Francesca Cabrini (Rome, S.Eugenio), in April 1951 the Fondazione Premi Roma hosted a vast anthology, introduced in the catalog by the writings of the friends R. Lucchese and G. Ungaretti. The same year the Accademia di San Luca awarded him the Einaudi Prize.International successesIn 1952 he held a solo exhibition at the Alexander Jolas Gallery in New York, inaugurating a period of activity in the international field. The same year the publisher De Luca published the first monograph, edited by R.Lucchese.In 1954 he participated in the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition that earned him the first prize for sculpture. The following year he obtained the chair of sculpture at the Academy of Florence: he will teach there for four years, while continuing to reside in Rome. Subsequently he will teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome (1958-1980). From 1956-57 is one of the most daring projects: the one for a monument to the victims of Auschwitz (not built): "It had to be a large horizontal surface of sixty meters on each side, like a concave square, carved out by paths that passed through the figures of the dead. And the people walking towards the center found themselves gradually lower and lower, until their heads were sculpted at eye level "(see Fazzini, cit., p.88). In the following years the commitment to monumental works became more and more important: in 1959-60 he executed the bronze portal of the church of San Giovanni Battista on the Autostrada del Sole (near the Florence north station) with scenes depicting the Passage of the Red Sea and the arrival of the Magi. Between 1961 and 1965 he dedicated himself to the Fountain for the ENI Palace in Rome EUR, imagining to "project the subsoil outside, isolating a fragment in such a way that one had the sensation of the deep stratifications of the earth up to the bowels from oil is extracted from "(see Fazzini, cit., p.88). The Monument to the Resistance in Ancona dates from 1964-65 and from the same period the sketch for a never built Monument to Kennedy: it had to be a large stele (30 meters high) with cuts and slits along the length that they discovered, against the light, Kennedy's profile (a smaller proof, later titled Metamorphosis and cast in bronze, was donated to his hometown years later). In 1965-66 he completed his work for the Palazzo della Federconsorzi in Rome: in 1955 he had completed a long frieze on the facade (52 meters by l5 in height) entitled I Campi, in 1965-66 he created inside the building a wooden high relief entitled Il sulco, a plowed field between two rows of twisted olive trees in which, recalling the Marche landscape, Fazzini rediscovered the extraordinary energy of his youthful reliefs. While commissions for public enterprises multiplied in Italy, interest abroad grew: in 1961 he held a solo show in Darmstadt, in 1962 at the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf. In 1963 a new monograph appears in Japan, contributing to the growing notoriety of the artist in this country, particularly interested in Italian sculpture (he will exhibit there in solo and group exhibitions in 1970, '71, '72, '73). From a stylistic point of view, the Sixties were full of experiments: continuing his search for abstraction from natural forms, Fazzini created the Conchiglia, a large mobile bronze sculpture for the port of San Benedetto del Tronto. Monument to the sailor (not built), a large white shape inspired by the movements of the sea, the wind and the flight of the seagulls, which had to rise 26 meters high and move in the air currents.The resurrectionIn 1970 the adventure of the Resurrection began, the large sculpture for the Audience Hall in the Vatican, which due to its historical significance can be considered as the landing point of all his research. It is easy to find summarized the great loves of Fazzini, the "physical sense of skin on the ribs" that in 1930 had brought him closer to the baroque and to Rodin, the mystical feeling of nature, which pushes him to reinvent the shapes of trees and clouds open to fan around Christ. Finally, the "job" that allows him also in this case to adapt new and advanced technical solutions (the starting point of the fusion was a life-size prototype made of a sort of polystyrene with the help of electric keys incandescent). The genesis of the sculpture is quite long: the first contacts with the Vatican took place in 1965, but the final decision came only in 1972, thanks to the personal intervention of Paul VI. The work and the subsequent fusion took almost seven years, until the inauguration which took place on 28 September 1977. The Gospel episode is rethought by Fazzini as a great explosion that upsets the garden of Gethsemane. Christ emerges from a composition of natural elements, at the bottom rock, roots, twisted branches of olive trees, higher clouds and finally a wide crown of lightning bolts. During the last stages of work (in August 1975) the artist, tried by great fatigue, is struck by thrombosis. The recovery takes place slowly and his last years pass in relative tranquility, between the studio in via Margutta and the house built in Grottammare near a wood of centuries-old oaks. Fazzini devotes himself above all to bronzes, to engraving and also to collecting many writings and notes.Two great anthologies present his long career to the public: the first in Avezzano in 1983, the second, in December 1984 at the National Gallery of Modern Art, once again alongside Alberto Ziveri. Among the main sources of inspiration in recent years we find the open spaces of the Adri atico, now suggested in a series of pastels that add the suggestion of color to the formal research, in an extreme figurative synthesis.He died in Rome on 4 December 1987. In one of his last notes we read: "Death and life are the same thing, they are part of the infinite mystery in which men and small invisible insects have the same weight, in an ever more mysterious universe that never wears out ".ESSENTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY: G.Ungaretti, R. Lucchese, Pericle Fazzini (catalog of the exhibition at the Ente Premi Roma) Rome 1951; R.Lucchese, Pericle Fazzini, Rome 1952 (with previous bibliography, critical anthology and artist's notes); D. Durbè, M. Fagiolo dell'Arco, V. Rivosecchi, Fazzini (catalog of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art), Rome 1984 (with previous bibliography); Fazzini Catalog, edited by G. De Feo, J. Teshigawara, V. Rivosecchi, Tokyo 1990; Fazzini Catalog, edited by A. Masi, Naples 1992; Fazzini and Grottammare Catalog, edited by V. Rivosecchi, Grottammare 1996. Very good condition, light flaws of humidityFrame, glass, with passepartout