Ennio Morlotti (1910-1992) - Bosco

Lithograph on paper in 11 colors - Artwork signed by hand in the bottom right and numbered in the bottom left - 50 x 70 cm - year 1991 - Limited edition - copy to be shipped with warranty certificate X/L - unframed - excellent condition - private collection - purchase and provenance: Italy - shipping via UPS - SDA - TNT - DHL - BRT.
Biography
Ennio Morlotti, one of the major figures in Italian and European art of the second half of the 20th century, was born in Lecco on Lake Como on September 21, 1910, into a family where the father was a war-invalid and the mother was a teacher.
After early schooling in a boarding school, where he excelled academically, he began in 1923 to work as an accountant in an oil mill, then until 1936 as an office worker in a paint factory and as a worker in a mechanical plant.
Despite the harsh living conditions of those years, he studied ancient art in churches and museums, and also showed interest in contemporary art, eventually obtaining his artistic maturità (high school diploma) in Brera as a private student.
Having resigned from the factory, he moved to Florence and enrolled in the Academy, where, under the guidance of Felice Carena, he graduated with a thesis on Giotto, achieving the highest marks.
In 1937, thanks to income from the sale of three paintings shown in a competition for the Lecco landscape, he traveled to Paris, where he saw the original works of his beloved Cézanne and Picasso.
In 1940 he joined the Corrente group, which drew inspiration from the university magazine "Corrente di vita giovanile," directed by Ernesto Treccani, following its French expressive-oriented stance, from Van Gogh to the Fauves.
In 1945 he married Anna, and the following year he joined the Communist Party, to which he adhered for six months; it was a difficult year economically but fruitful culturally, as he signed the Manifesto of Realism, joined the Front of the Arts (Fronte Nuovo delle Arti) and held his first solo exhibition at the II Camino gallery in Milan. That year, thanks to a scholarship secured by Lionello Venturi, he could have resided in Paris for two years with Renato Birolli, but after two months he returned to Milan because he could not paint; nonetheless he had met and visited Picasso’s studio, and had met Braque, Dominguez, De Staël, Sartre, and Camus.
It was right after the 24th Venice Biennale (1948), where he exhibited with all the artists of Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, that Morlotti defined his position, separating himself from the group’s “realist” members together with Birolli.
It was precisely in the 1950s that he produced some of the capital works of informal art, not only Italian but also European, surely linked to the experiences of artists such as Wols, Fautrier, De Staël, but also Pollock and de Kooning.
The Biennale repeatedly hosted his works: in 1950, in 1952 alongside the Gruppo degli Otto, in 1954 with a room presented by Giovanni Testori (exhibiting works which were destroyed immediately afterward), in 1962 winning the prize (tied with Capogrossi) reserved for an Italian artist, in 1964 within the section "Art of today in museums," in 1972 with a solo room, in 1988 with another solo show in the pavilion dedicated to Italy, and in the section dedicated to the review "Il Fronte nuovo delle Arti alla Biennale del 1948".
In 1986 and 1992 he was invited to the National Quadriennial of Art in Rome.
The most important comprehensive exhibitions of the last decade include those of 1987 in Locarno and Milan, and the 1994 show in Ferrara, held posthumously after his death on December 15, 1992 in Milan.