EMANUELE CAVALLI
Lucera, 1904 - Florence, 1981

The Shepherd, 1968
Oil on board, 46 x 45 cm
Signed lower right: E. Cavalli
Signed and dated on the back: E. Cavalli, Il Pastore, 1968
Signed and stamped on the back by Galleria La Vite, Rome

BIOGRAPHY: Coming from a family of landowners, in 1921 he moved to Rome. After his first studies at the industrial artistic institute, he enters the school of the painter Felice Carena. The long stays in Anticoli Corrado, a place of lively cultural activity, were also important for his training as a painter. . In 1926 three of his works were welcomed by the jury of the Venice Biennale (from now on his participation in this review will be almost continuous). He made his debut in 1927, with Capogrossi and F. Di Cocco exhibited at the Dinesen pension, arousing considerable interest. In 1928 he went to France, where he was introduced by his friend O. Martinelli into the environment of the Italiens de Paris (De Pisis, De Chirico, Savinio etc.). In Paris, C. exhibited at the Salon Bovy together with Pirandello and Di Cocco. In 1930 he is again in Rome. The years 1931-33 are fundamental for the development and affirmation of tonalism, an aesthetic and pictorial direction that finds in Cavalli one of the most refined and also the most aware interpreters from a theoretical point of view. A series of exhibitions are important for the affirmation of the current: at the Galleria di Roma (May and December 1932: two collective exhibitions in which they are already present, alongside C., Cagli and C. Capogrossi), at the Milanese gallery Il Milione (February 1933: Cagli, Capogrossi and C.) again exhibit at the Parisian gallery J. Bonjean (December 1933). In this brilliant series of exhibitions the group has the support of the gallery owners P.M. Bardi (Galleria di Roma) and V. Ghiringhelli (Il Milione) as well as the writer M. Bontempelli, uncle of Cagli and theorist of "magic realism", a literary tendency that has more than one point of contact with the painting of the young tonalists. Also noteworthy is the contribution of R. Melli, both as a painter and as a critic.
In 1933 Capogrossi, Cavalli and Melli (as a critic) compiled together the "Manifesto of Plastic Primordialism" in which they express their ideas on tonal painting, with a strong accentuation of the spiritual and abstract side of the pictorial operation. In 1935 Cavalli exhibited a group of works at the II Quadriennale. Over time, Cavalli develops the theme of the relationship between painting and music: on the occasion of the Quadrennial of 1943, he presents a series of nine female figures each dressed in a different shade, and explains his work in terms of "contrapuntal sensitivity", comparing it to a "collection of preludes and fugues in major and minor tones"
These years of intense and fruitful activity were crowned by two important personal exhibitions (at the Leonardo da Vinci gallery in Florence in 1939 and at the Zodiac in Rome in 1945) and by the victory in the competition for the chair for painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence (1945). In this city the artist moved with his wife Vera Haberfeld (niece of the psychoanalyst Edoardo Weiss) whom he had married in 1935.
1949, with the non-renewal of the teaching assignment, marked the beginning of a profound crisis, to which the abstractionist orientation that his ancient traveling companions, Cagli and Capogrossi, began to follow at that time was not foreign.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: F.Benzi, "Tonalism and esotericism in the painting of Emanuele Cavalli" (catal., Arco Farnese gallery), Rome 1984;
F. Benzi - R. Lucchese, "Emanuele Cavalli", Rome 1984; Catalog of the exhibition Rome 1934 edited by F. D'Amico, G. Appella in Rome, Modena-Rome 1986.

Good conditions
Frame, glass, with passepartout