Master Arturo Carmassi

Arturo Carmassi, Italian painter, sculptor and graphic designer was born in Lucca, Italy, on July 2, 1925. His mother died when the artist was only two years old and in fact he grew up with his aunt, his mother’s sister and her husband. In 1929 he moved with his family to Turin, the center city of anti-fascism, because his uncle did not agree with Mussolini’s ideals. Here he attended elementary, middle, and high school, the Fontanesi Landscape School, and was admitted to the prestigious Accademia Albertina, which, however, he would leave after only 15 days.

From then on, Carmassi is attentive to stimuli from outside and makes contacts with the cultural and artistic world around him.

Carmassi began painting at a young age, before World War II, making portraits of his family members and his first nude, which unfortunately, however, except for two works were lost when his house was bombed.

The beginning of his artistic career began in the 1940s, when in 1946 he decided, out of sheer curiosity, to leave for Paris. Carmassi describes the French capital as a great intellectual city of the time; in fact, he met many men of culture there, especially at the famous “Café de Flores,” which the artist frequented a lot.

Between the 1940s and 1950s the art scene in Italy was very much dominated by Picasso and Cubism, but Carmassi was never a Picassian. During these years, he spent a great deal of time traveling around Europe, and it was through this that the artist threw himself within an unexplored linguistic beginning to find his art. Indeed, in this experience and in his contacts with the cultural elite, an awareness grew in him that more than individual and specific “ways of doing things,” the great lesson of the past was freedom of expression. This is why Carmassi held an autonomous position in art from the very beginning, far from “groups” and theoretical statements. Deep introspection, personal means and own thinking.

In 1952 he received an invitation to the XXVI Venice Biennale, which the artist, however, not feeling ready and still with a wanderlust, declined. In the same year he moved to Milan, where he would confront the tradition of the Historic Avant-Garde. However, soon Carmassi would distinguish himself through autonomous artistic making, which led him as early as the 1940s to show solo exhibitions to critical acclaim. This enabled him to meet the greatest artistic expressions of the time and to make friends with Gino Ghiringhelli of the “Il Milione” Gallery, who would become his dealer, and in 1956 he took over the studio on Andegari Street.

For Arturo Carmassi, the 1950s were full of commitments and successes due to solo and group exhibitions in which he exhibited in various public and private galleries throughout Italy and around the world, including a show at the Brooklyn Museum of New York in 1957 and in 1958 at the Antwerp Sculpture Biennial.

From 1955 to 1965 the painter also devoted himself to sculpture with large-scale works that he took to the 1962 Venice Biennale.

In the mid-1950s Carmassi developed a strong interest in sculpture, and in the following decade his work as a sculptor took on more and more space, so much so that he settled in Liguria, in Bocca di Magra, where he set up a large sculpture studio giving life to large-scale works, which three years later would see him take center stage with a solo room at the Venice Biennale.

From the second half of the 1960s, the artist’s poetics shifted from informal abstraction to depiction. Here he confirms an artistic language characterized by surrealist connotations, which found a place in the works exhibited from 1969 to 1972 at the Trentadue Gallery in Milan.

After the 1970s, his interest in not only sculpture but also lithography and intaglio became stronger, making him one of the most important and interesting artists on the international scene.

As for his personal life, Carmassi, still young, met Marta Vio, a banker’s daughter, who would later become his wife. But the marriage does not last long; in fact, after the death of his father-in-law, the eccentric Carmassi, under the guise of going to buy cigars, will not return to their home.

The following year Carmassi met the woman of his life, Marise Druart, to whom he would marry and with whom he would share both his private life and work until Marise’s untimely death

Marise’s death, deeply marked Carmassi, so much so that he lost the use of colors for many years. In fact, he feels the need to reduce his means of expression to the bare minimum, to strip language of any element that is not absolutely necessary. After all, Carmassi’s entire oeuvre is nothing but the pursuit of the expression of emotions, the telling of the inner adventure, and the respect for the mystery of life.

Carmassi died in Fucecchio (Florence) in 2015.

All those who knew him while alive hold him in such high esteem that they call him “Master” and describe themselves as suffering from a profound alteration, “Carmassite.”

Arturo Carmassi dedicated his life to art, from childhood to death, studying all its facets and evolutions, becoming an expert connoisseur of it and leaving us today works that tell us about a unique and rare journey.