Adolfo De Carolis (1874-1928) - Il timone - 1908

Adolfo De Carolis, 1874-1928
"Il timone" 1908

Woodcut in two blocks
dimensions 35 x 21.7 cm
Sheet 48 x 33.5 cm

In the first decade of the 1900s, De Carolis devoted much attention to reviving popular themes, particularly those depicting seascapes, as this print testifies. The use of multiple colors and thus a greater number of blocks suits the liveliness of these subjects.
Marine prints express an autonomous poetry. The launch, The Winch, The Rudder, The Mouth (estuary) and The Arks— all wood engravings made between 1904 and 1908.

Excellent condition, printed on smooth ivory paper, with wide margins, losses along the edge of the sheet (see photo) with small restorations on the back, one about 2 cm sewn in the lower corner.

Adolfo De Carolis was an Italian painter, engraver, illustrator, wood engraver and photographer.
He was a master of wood engraving, founding the Corporation of Woodcut Artists and modernizing Italian book illustration.
A protagonist of Italian idealist and symbolist art between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, De Carolis had a decisive influence on the formative development of floral taste, working equally in the fields of illustration, painting, and photography. Often placed by critics in the Liberty/Art Nouveau context, De Carolis polemically opposed his artistic faith in Renaissance and hermetic tradition to the capriccio of the organicist of the "new art," as particularly evident in an article on Leonardo after a visit to the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin in 1902.
His work rather shows an evolution of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, strongly conditioned by models and styles of Japonism on one side, and by a restless Michelangelesque formalism on the other.
De Carolis collaborated with great writers, illustrating with drawings and wood engravings works by Gabriele D'Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli, with an unmistakable graphic style.