Ennio Morlotti (1910-1992) - Bosco

Lithograph on paper in 11 colours - Work signed by hand at the bottom right and numbered at the bottom left - 50 x 70 cm - year 1991 - Limited edition - specimen to be shipped with certificate of guarantee VII/L - unframed - excellent condition - private collection - purchase and provenance Italy - shipping via UPS - SDA - TNT - DHL - BRT.
Biography
Ennio Morlotti, one of the main figures of the Italian and European artistic scene of the second half of the twentieth 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 completing early schooling in a boarding school, where he excelled academically, in 1923 he began working as an accountant in a oil refinery, then until 1936 as a employee in a paint shop and as a worker in a mechanical factory.
Despite the harsh living conditions of those years, he devoted himself to studying ancient art in churches and museums, also taking an interest in contemporary art, until he earned artistic maturity as a private student at Brera.
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, obtaining the highest marks.
In 1937, thanks to income from the sale of three paintings exhibited for a competition for the Lecco landscape, he undertook a trip 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 student magazine "Corrente di vita giovanile," directed by Ernesto Treccani, following its French expressionist orientation, from Van Gogh to the Fauves.
In 1945 he married Anna and the following year he joined the Communist Party, which he adhered to for six months; this was a difficult year economically but fruitful culturally, as he signed the Manifesto of Realism, joined the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti and held his first solo show at the II Camino gallery in Milan. In that year, thanks to a fellowship granted 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 visited Picasso’s studio, had met Braque, Dominguez, De Staël, Sartre and Camus.
It is then, right after the 24th Venice Biennale (1948), where he exhibited together with all the artists of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, that Morlotti’s stance was defined, and together with Birolli he split from the members of the “realist” faction of the group.
It is precisely in the 1950s that he produced some of the pivotal 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 hosted his works many times: in 1950, in 1952 together with the Gruppo degli Otto, in 1954 with a room presented by Giovanni Testori (the works were destroyed immediately after), in 1962 winning the prize (ex aequo with Capogrossi) awarded to an Italian artist, in 1964 within the section "Art 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 "The Fronte Nuovo delle Arti at the 1948 Biennale."
In 1986 and 1992 he was invited to the Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in Rome.
The most important comprehensive exhibitions of the last decade are those of 1987 in Locarno and in Milan, and the 1994 in Ferrara, staged after his death, which occurred on December 15, 1992 in Milan.