Francesco Messina (1900-1995) - Nudo

Lithography on paper in 3 colors - Hand-signed work at the bottom right and numbered at the bottom left - 50x70 cm - year 1989 - Limited edition - specimen to be shipped with guarantee certificate 57/100 - unframed - excellent condition - private collection - purchase and provenance Italy - shipment via UPS - SDA - DHL - TNT - BRT.
Biography
Francesco Messina was born on December 15, 1900 in Linguaglossa, a small town at the foot of Mount Etna, to Angelo Messina and Ignazia Cristaldi. His family was very humble: to escape poverty, in 1901 his parents decided to emigrate to America. Reaching Genoa, the Messina family did not embark because they were too poor to afford the journey, and settled in vico Fosse Del Colle, in the heart of one of the city’s most popular areas, where the future artist spent a solitary childhood among narrow streets, the port wharves, and rocks. He soon felt drawn to sculpture: by day Messina worked in the marble workers’ shops, where he learned the craft; by night he attended courses to complete elementary school and drawing classes. In the marble workers’ shops around the Staglieno Cemetery, Messina became aware of the materials of sculpture (especially marble and bronze) and learned the techniques of work: the relationship with the material and knowledge of traditional sculpture techniques would be essential starting points and references for his artistic practice. After fighting in World War I, he returned to Genoa, attended the courses at the Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti, and formed relationships with various writers and intellectuals, including Eugenio Montale, who introduced him to poetry, and Salvatore Quasimodo. In 1921 he exhibited at the I Biennale di Napoli and from 1922 began participating in Venice, where he appeared in all editions until 1942, the year he won the First Prize, and where he met artists such as Carlo Carrà and Adolfo Wildt. In 1922 he met Bianca Fochessati Clerici, a well-off married woman with a daughter, who would become his wife only in 1943. One of the couple’s few friends was Montale: together they undertook one of his early journeys of artistic instruction, visiting the major Tuscan cities. In 1926 he first exhibited in Milan, at the Italian 20th Century exhibition, where he presented a Self-Portrait and met colleague Arturo Martini, friend and rival. In 1929 he held his first solo show in Milan presented by Carlo Carrà and began to exhibit more frequently abroad. At thirty-two he moved to the Lombard capital, which he already frequented for cultural initiatives and foundries, where he came into contact with cultural figures such as Alfonso Gatto and Giorgio Morandi. During this period he undertook study trips to major European museums and to Greece, where he came into direct contact with the great classical statuary. On these occasions Messina had the opportunity to see, and often physically touch, ancient works from which to draw lessons and which for him represent the perfection toward which the artist must strive. The interest in antiquity and the need for direct contact with works of the past also materialize in the creation of a small archaeological collection, consisting of about seventy pieces of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan production, and artifacts of Egyptian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican origin. The artist kept it on display in the living room of his Milanese home, intending to donate it later to Milan, his city of adoption. The collection’s most substantial core consists of terracotta figures of Greek and Magna Graecian production, depicting foals, draped female figures, and nude figures — all subjects dear to the artist and which still preserve traces of vivid colors in some cases. The polychromy, typical of classical art, is found in many of Messina’s works, and he paid great attention to color in his terracotta, plaster, and bronze sculptures. His reflection on classical art and tradition interweaves with ongoing experimentation and an open search for stimuli of his time. By the late 1920s he became a nationally renowned artist and one of the leading representatives of Italian art. In 1934 he earned, by competition, the chair of sculpture at the Brera Academy as the successor to Adolfo Wildt; two years later he was also appointed director of all schools of art at the Academy. Due to his proximity to the Fascist regime, evident in commissions and numerous portraits of the government’s top figures executed during the Twenty Years, at the end of World War II he was dismissed from teaching. Already in 1947, however, he regained the chair at Brera, also thanks to the intervention of some anti-fascist friends, including Renato Guttuso and Sirio Musso. In the same year he gained international critical and public recognition, exhibiting in Buenos Aires, on the encouragement of his friend Lucio Fontana, and in Philadelphia. In the 1950s the sculptor was deeply involved in exhibitions in Italy and abroad and was in high demand both for public and monumental works and for private pieces. Among his most famous public works, created between the late 1950s and the 1960s, are the busts of Giacomo Puccini and Pietro Mascagni for La Scala, the Monument to Saint Catherine at Castel Sant’Angelo, the Monument to Pius XII for St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Dying Horse for RAI, which made him famous to a broad audience. Frequent interviews and public appearances also became common, where his skill as a draftsman, sculptor, painter, and even poet was praised. In these years too he continued his figurative and classically derived research, which met with both approval and resistance. Messina remained faithful to this choice of tradition and realism even when colleagues and friends took different paths. With these premises, the sculptor confronted the themes that most interested his artistic research: portraiture; representation of the body and movement; the taste for the fragment, typical of the Twentieth Century, but which for Messina is also a call back to archaeology at ruins, useful to express the transience of things. His creative process begins with study from life and drawing, followed by a terracotta model to be translated, i.e., realized, in bronze or marble. In the early 1970s, after retirement, Francesco Messina established his studio in the former San Sisto church, granted to him by the Municipality in exchange for a complete restoration of the building. In this space Messina created not only his new workshop but also his monographic museum, thanks mainly to a selection of works donated to the City of Milan and forming the initial core of the Studio Museum collection. Simultaneously, Messina chose to donate some of his works to important Italian museums, such as the National Museum of the Bargello in Florence, and to foreign ones, such as the Munich Gallery of Modern Art, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. In 1994 he received the Sculpture Prize from the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. He passed away on September 13, 1995 in Milan, the city that welcomed and hosted him for much of his life and that had conferred honorary citizenship on him years earlier. The Presidency of the Republic posthumously awarded him the Culture Prize.