Le amiche

Massimo Campigli (July 4, 1895 as ''Max Ihlenfeld'' - 1971) was an Italian painter and journalist. Born in Berlin, he spent most of his childhood in Florence. His family moved to Milan in 1909, and here he worked at the magazine ''Letteratura,'' frequenting avant-garde circles and making the acquaintance of Boccioni and Carrà. In 1914 the futurist magazine ''Lacerba'' published his Giornale + Strada - Parole in libertà. During World War I Campigli was captured and deported to Hungary where he remained a prisoner of war from 1916-18. At the end of the war, he moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Milanese newspaper "Corriere della Sera." Although he had already made some drawings during the war, it was only after his arrival in Paris that he began to paint. At the Café du Dôme he frequented artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Gino Severini and Filippo De Pisis. Long visits to the Louvre deepened Campigli's interest in the art of ancient Egypt, which became an enduring source of his painting. His early figurative works apply geometric designs to the human figure, reflecting the influence of Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger and the purism of ''L'Esprit Nouveau.'' In 1923 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Bragaglia in Rome. Over the next five years his figures developed a monumental quality, often with stylized poses and the limbs woven into a sculptural solidity. The importance given to order and tradition, the atmosphere of serenity and eternity are in line with the postwar reconstruction and the program of the ''Novecento'' artists with whom Campigli exhibited frequently both in Milan from 1926-29 and abroad from 1927-31. From 1926 he joined the ''Paris Italians'' along with Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, Renato Paresce, Savinio, Severini and Mario Tozzi. In 1928, the year of his debut at the Venice Biennale, he was greatly impressed by the Etruscan collection during a visit to the National Etruscan Museum in Rome. He then broke away from the compact rigor of his earlier works in favor of a plan with subdued tones and schematic forms rich in archaisms. During a trip to Romania with his first wife Magdalena Rădulescu, he began a new cycle of works depicting women engaged in domestic and agricultural labor. These figures are arranged in asymmetrical, hieratic compositions, hovering over a rough plane inspired by ancient frescoes. These works were enthusiastically received by critics at the exhibition held at the Jeanne Bucher Gallery in Paris in 1929 and at the Galleria Milione in Milan in 1931. During the 1930s he held a series of solo exhibitions in New York, Paris and Milan that earned him international recognition. In 1933 Campigli returned to Milan where he worked on large-scale projects. In the same year he signed Mario Sironi's Manifesto of Mural Art and painted a fresco of mothers, peasants, workers, for the Fifth Milan Triennale, unfortunately later destroyed. Other works were commissioned over the next ten years: "The Builders" for the League of Nations in Geneva in 1937; "Don't Kill" for the Court of Justice in Milan in 1938; a huge 300-square-meter fresco for the entrance hall, designed by Gio Ponti, of the Liviano in Padua, which he painted in 1939-40. After his divorce in 1939, Campigli remarried sculptor Giuditta Scalini. Together they spent the war years in Milan and Venice, then after the war they divided their time between Rome, Paris and Saint-Tropez. In 1943 their son Nicola was born in Venice. In a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1948 he exhibited his new compositions: female figures inserted in complicated architectural structures. In the 1960s his figures are reduced to colored signs in a group of almost abstract canvases. In 1967 a retrospective exhibition was dedicated to Campigli at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. He died in 1971 in Saint-Tropez.