Antonio Berni Biography
Delesio Antonio Berni (Rosario, 14 May 1905 – Buenos Aires, 13 October 1981) was an Argentine painter, engraver and fresco muralist. In 1925, thanks to a scholarship, Berni went to Madrid, with the intention of getting to know contemporary Spanish art, which was very popular in Argentina in those years. After a short period of time in Madrid, he came to the conclusion that the source of inspiration for Spanish, and in general European, painting was Paris, where he moved. In Paris he came into contact with many artists and intellectuals, including Xul Solar, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, André Lhote and Othon Friesz: influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and the art of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte , he developed a painting initially inspired by Cubism, to then arrive at a Surrealism far from the automatism of Joan Miró or the oneirism of Salvador Dalí, more similar to the style of Giorgio De Chirico. In these years he became closer to the political ideas of Karl Marx, collaborating with illustrations for communist newspapers. In 1930 he returned to Argentina, where he was among the founders of the Nuevo Realismo group which was supposed to initiate a politically engaged national art focused on the oppressed. In 1932 he participated with his canvases in one of the first surrealist exhibitions in Latin America: the exhibition, however, was ignored by the public and panned by critics. In those years the world was going through a period characterized by totalitarianism that would lead to war; Argentina was also in a difficult situation, with a conservative dictatorship, social struggles, strikes and unemployment. Berni felt that Surrealism was far from these problems and began to move closer to socialist realism. After a journey through Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, whose influence is present in his works of the time, starting from the end of the 1940s Berni painted people with symbols of peace, precisely in the years in which began carrying out the first nuclear weapons tests. At the beginning of the 1950s his works reflect the exploitation of the poorer classes, to which are added the themes of ecology and the excessive exploitation of natural resources; these works achieved good success with the public and critics and were exhibited in various foreign cities. From the end of the 1950s, through a style characterized by the use of collage and assemblage, he created some pictorial cycles in which disinherited characters from the urban periphery appear, including the emblematic and poetic figures of Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel. In 1976 Berni spent some time in New York, which struck him as sumptuous, consumerist, materially rich but spiritually poor. Antonio Berni died on October 13, 1981 in Buenos Aires.
