Salvatore Fiume (1915-1997) - Tauromachia. 1970

Salvatore Fiume, Tauromachia. circa 1970. Original lithograph. Sheet size 76 x 56 cm. Signed in pencil and numbered 24/40. Produced by Galleria La Pergola - Pesaro (dry stamp). Fabriano paper (watermark). In good condition — light marginal foxing and very small corner folds. Auction without reserve. It is not recommended to purchase outside the EU (the order may experience delays or be canceled).

Salvatore Fiume (Comiso, October 23, 1915 – Milan, June 3, 1997) was an Italian painter, illustrator and writer. He was also a sculptor, architect and stage designer.

“In Sicily people prefer not to do things but to tell them, pretending to have done them; and the satisfaction of telling them is greater than the satisfaction one feels elsewhere doing them.”

Biography

Salvatore Fiume at five years old, with his father Luciano
Youth experiences (1915-1949)

Salvatore Fiume, a student in Urbino, with his classmates
Salvatore Fiume was born in Comiso, Sicily, on October 23, 1915. At sixteen, thanks to his talent and passion for art, he won a scholarship to attend the Regio Istituto d'Arte del Libro in Urbino. After completing his studies in 1936, he moved to Milan.

At twenty-three, in 1938, Fiume moved to Ivrea, where he became art director of a cultural magazine promoted by Adriano Olivetti, Tecnica e organizzazione; during these years he wrote his first literary work, the novel Viva Gioconda!, published in Milan in 1943.

Wanting to devote himself mainly to painting, in 1946 he left Ivrea to settle in Canzo, where he began his path in sculpture and architecture.

In the same year, in Milan, he presented a series of tempera and ink drawings to the poet Raffaele Carrieri, who was enthusiastic about them.

The first major commissions (1949-1962)

His first official exhibition, which included works from the cycle Isole di statue (Islands of Statues) and Città di statue (City of Statues) and which allowed him to arouse great interest from critics and to establish contacts with artistic and cultural institutions worldwide, was held in 1949 at Galleria Borromini in Milan; here his work was acquired by Alfred H. Barr Jr., director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and by the Jucker collection in Milan. In the same year he took part in the exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art at MoMA in New York. The following year, in 1950, he was invited to the Venice Biennale where he exhibited the triptych Island of Statues, a work that Life magazine devoted a page to and which is now part of the Vatican Museums’ Modern and Contemporary Art collection.

In the same year he was invited by architect Gio Ponti to create a large work measuring 48 x 3 meters for the first-class lounge of the Andrea Doria, the famous ocean liner that sank in 1956 off Nantucket, Massachusetts. The large canvas, titled “The Legends of Italy,” depicted an imaginary Renaissance city rich with Italian masterpieces from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reproduced by Fiume himself. The large canvas was painted and prepared for transport at Fiume’s Canzo studio, in the province of Como, where the artist was assisted by young painters Gianfranco Ferroni, Angelo Daverio and Salvatore Jemolo.

As early as 1949 he was working on a cycle of ten large paintings, commissioned by industrialist Bruno Buitoni Sr., titled Adventures, Misfortunes and Glories of Ancient Perugia, which finished in 1952; in these works Fiume’s interest in Renaissance painting is evident, particularly that of Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello. In 1951 architect Gio Ponti commissioned him two paintings to be placed on transatlantic ships: Italia Mitica on Julius Caesar and The Legends of Italy on the Andrea Doria, which was the artist’s largest work measuring 3 x 48 meters, i.e., 144 square meters, later destroyed by the infamous shipwreck.

In 1953 New York magazines Life and Time commissioned him to produce works in which Fiume depicted an imaginary history of Manhattan and New York Bay, imagined as islands of statues.

World travels (1962-1997)

Thus began a phase of world-wide contacts, travels and exhibitions for the painter. These journeys were for Fiume of great importance for gathering impressions, sounds, forms and colors of ancient and modern cultures, which broadened his artistic personality and provided material for the expansion of a global imaginary, always disciplined by the prevailing lesson of Mediterranean classicism.

In 1962 a traveling exhibition of one hundred Fiume paintings visited several museums in Germany, including Cologne and Regensburg. In 1973, together with his photographer friend Walter Mori, Fiume went to the Valley of Babile in Ethiopia, where he painted some of his islands on various rocks, using marine anticorrosive paints. A life-size model of a section of these rocks was made by Fiume for the grand retrospective of 1974 at the Palazzo Reale in Milan; the model filled almost the entire Great Hall of the Cariatidi. At the same show he presented for the first time the work African Mona Lisa, a painting in which Fiume offered homage to the beauty of the African woman, portraying her in the same pose as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: it is now housed in the Vatican Museums, after the donation of 34 paintings to the Vatican by the artist.

In 1975 the Calabrian town of Fiumefreddo Bruzio accepted Salvatore Fiume’s proposal to revitalize the historic center free of charge with some of his works. The painter therefore painted, between 1975 and 1976, several interior and exterior walls of the ancient half-ruined castle, and in 1977 the vault of the San Rocco chapel. In the Nineties he placed a bronze sculpture in each of the two panoramic squares of Fiumefreddo. Subsequent exhibitions followed: in 1985 at Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome; in 1987 the De Architectura Pingendi exhibition at Sporting d’Hiver in Monte Carlo inaugurated by Prince Rainier of Monaco; in 1991 at the International Architecture Show in Milan, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni; in 1992 at Villa Medici, home of the French Academy in Rome.

In 1993 Fiume visited, with photographer Mimmo Dabbrescia, the places where Gauguin lived in Polynesia; he also donated a painting to the Gauguin Museum in Tahiti, as a homage to the great French master. From this experience arose the book Omaggio alla Polinesia, Prospettive d’arte, Milan, 1992.

Salvatore Fiume died in Milan on June 3, 1997. His works are preserved in some of the world’s most important museums, including the Vatican Museums, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan.

Theater and literature

Salvatore Fiume in 1953 with Maria Callas on the stage of La Scala in Milan. Maria Callas wears a costume designed by the artist
Another element that testifies to Salvatore Fiume’s polyhedral creativity is the range of experiences he gathered in his career as a sensitive interpreter of the world around him. As a stage designer, from 1950 to 1960, he was a protagonist at La Scala in Milan (sets and costumes for La vida breve by Manuel de Falla), at Covent Garden in London, at the Opera House in Rome and at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo.

His writing activity began in 1943 with the novel Viva Gioconda!. Subsequently Fiume published two more novels, many stories, several comedies, a tragedy and two poetry collections. His book Pagine libere, from 1994, contains very personal observations on life and art. His work as a storyteller, poet and dramatist earned him an honorary degree in Modern Letters in 1988 from the University of Palermo.

Sculpture

As a sculptor Fiume debuted in 1994 with an exhibition for the Artesanterasmo Gallery in Milan. In fact his first experiences included a few plaster bas-reliefs dating to the forties. He later used other materials such as rush, ceramics, bronze, marble, and resin. A series of experiences that had resulted in marble sculptures, based on Fiume’s drawings and using mechanical techniques, led the artist to desire creating his own sculptures without any intermediaries.

Thus, at the age of 79, Fiume personally created large-scale sculptures, such as The Three Graces, from a plasticine model to the final form in polychrome resin: an extremely arduous undertaking which, according to family members, also contributed to undermining the artist’s health. His production includes works in stone, bronze, resin, wood and ceramic, some of which are large-scale, such as the bronze statue in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the stone groups for the San Raffaele Hospitals in Milan and Rome, and the bronze group for the Vinovian Fountain in Marsala. An outdoor exhibition of his sculptures was hosted in 1995 by the Centro Allende in Spezia.