Renato Javarone (1894-1960) - Gatti

Renato Javarone (1894 - 1960)

Oil painting on Masonite depicting four cats.
Signature bottom right: "Javarone"

Dimensions of painting: 55.5 x 29.0 cm
Frame dimensions: 65.5 x 39.0 cm

Good condition, signs of wear; small defects to the frame (see photos)

Attention:
I don’t ship to the United States because, from Italy, due to the introduction of tariffs, there are no couriers that ship goods from private individuals.


Renato Javarone was born in Puglia, in Gioia del Colle, in 1894. In the immediate aftermath of the Great War he settled in Rome in the Baroque Casino of the Uccelliera at Villa Borghese, where he would live until 1960, the year of his death...

Fourteen years after the birth of Francesco Romano, regarded as the best Apulian landscape painter of the first quarter of the twentieth century, and twenty-two years after the birth of another important Gioian painter, Enrico Castellaneta, Renato Javarone was born on 1-1-1894 in Gioia del Colle. Unlike the first two, Javarone did not pursue studies in art schools.

His father was involved in selling the products of hemp processing, while his mother ran a small establishment where distillation was performed and some liqueurs were bottled. After attending elementary and ginnasio (middle) school in Gioia del Colle, he enrolled in secondary schools in Bari. From the start he showed an interest in painting, so much so that by the age of 16 he began traveling outside his province and region, perhaps in search of artists who could guide him in his future career.

As he often said, he declared himself to be self-taught, and some people used to say that he was his own master and his own disciple.

As many artists of the time had done, including our Francesco Romano, Javarone, who had turned 28, in 1912 moved to Rome, not only the political capital of Italy which had celebrated the previous year the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification, but also a cultural center and a reference point for artists and intellectuals of that period.

Continuing in the wake of the Apulian painters Gioacchino Toma, Giuseppe De Nittis, Domenico Cantatore, Giovanni Consolazione, Renato Javarone also sets out for Rome after having absorbed the elements of southern painting, distant from academic reinterpretations and from foreign influences.

In the capital he lives for several years in an atmosphere of intense vitality and commitment until, swept up by the fever that had pervaded the interventionists during the First World War, he decides to enlist as a volunteer and, as a Second Lieutenant of Artillery, he goes to the front. During a combat action, though wounded, he asks to remain in service in the rear. The war period, however, does not prevent him from pursuing his passion for painting, a pursuit that he resumes full-time after the conflict.

He returns briefly to Apulia and, specifically, to Bari, where in the meantime his parents had moved there for work.

At the beginning of the second decade, we find him again in Rome, a city where he resumes painting in his studio on Via Flaminia, not far from Villa Borghese, where, following his father's death, his mother also comes to join him.

Rome, in those years, was the preferred destination for those artists who, pursuing an alternative line of inquiry to abstraction and the twentieth‑century aesthetics, rediscovered the value of reality through a reinterpretation of past art, namely that of the ancients and the primitives, studying both its techniques and its figurative tradition.

Throughout that twenty-year period, as Enrico Castellaneta had done before, he travels to Capri, where he befriends the Livorno-born artist Plinio Nomellini, a painter of the Divisionist current.

After a few years he is ready to participate in important exhibitions, where he arouses admiration and approval not only from visitors but also from talented artists. His merit is confirmed by certificates of merit obtained during his participation in the Third Exhibition of Puglian Art in 1922 in Bari, an exhibition also attended by his fellow villagers Francesco Romano and Enrico Castellaneta. Indeed, for that occasion Romilda Mayer in the Corriere delle Puglie of August 23 writes, among other things: 'The strong and fortunate colorist, who has never attended any Academy or Institute of Fine Arts and is self-taught; admirable because only his good will and his natural disposition have made him an artist. Very admired, especially among his landscapes, are the two Capri seascapes, of which he is wonderfully rendered in the clear mirror of the sea and in the reflections of the sky, all a suggestive enchantment.' Renato Javarone is also a sure promise who should be encouraged, just as he is admired.

A testament to his worth as an artist is his participation in the 15th edition of the Venice Biennale in 1924. After him, only two Gioiesi artists appear in the Venice Biennale: Mimmo Castellano for the photography section and Mimmo Alfarone for painting.

The Biennale constitutes a springboard for future Exhibitions, among which are to be remembered those of 1925–26 in Rome: Javarone’s Family Portrait at Casa d’Arte Palazzi at the Foro Italico and at the Lyceum femminile in Via dei Prefetti, and the one in Milan at the Bottega di Poesia. The same King Vittorio Emanuele III, after having visited one of his Exhibitions in Rome, repeatedly visits Javarone in his studio at the Casina dell’Uccelliera in Villa Borghese.

In Rome, he befriends the painter Armando Spadini (1883-1925), one of the most representative artists of the so-called Roman School. After Spadini's death, Javarone settles in the rooms of the Uccelliera, located in a corner of the garden of Villa Borghese, a place that had been the painter's workshop-home.

In that corner of paradise, Javarone lets his imagination and his artistic vein run free, taking part in numerous exhibitions organized not only in Italy but also abroad.

G. B. Fanelli, on the occasion of the publication of the catalog prepared for the National Exhibition of Art held at Stresa Borromeo in 1929, writes of Javarone: Born in Apulia, in the land of the famous Francesco Romano, he brings into every work the natural and spontaneous richness of his homeland and sky. He is a master in painting, complete in all his harmonious techniques, in calm, considered interiors, and thus fully accomplished. This artist is a man of achievement. Known at the Venice Biennale, he has already sold four works in three years to His Majesty the King of Italy, two to the Ministry of the Interior, and several to great collectors in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, and many major cities in Italy. He has a coherent style of painting; the subtle penetration of his interpretations reaches a level of perfection scarcely attainable.

Only after his mother's death, specifically in 1934, did he decide to marry, and from his marriage he has three children.

Not even the outbreak of World War II, in which Javarone serves as an auxiliary to the reserve for internal voluntary service, slows his artistic impulse, which is expressed in numerous works and his participation in national and international exhibitions.

The fame he has achieved takes him around the world, where he exhibits his paintings, always receiving praise from both the public and the critics. The results he has attained, besides making him proud, do not make him forget his homeland and his country, the place where he had seen his birth and had nurtured his passion for painting, as is evidenced by an interview given abroad in which he recalls his Gioiese origin and our Gioia.

He dies in Rome in 1960 at the end of a life spent on painting, handing down to posterity a vast body of work that is scattered around the world"..." . (Francesco Giannini)