Arturo Carmassi Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Born in Lucca on 2 July 1925, he moved with his family to Turin as a child, where he studied at the Fontanesi Landscape School and for a short period at the Albertina Academy. At the beginning of his activity he asserted an independent position within a world (that of the city of Turin) strongly influenced by the neo-cubist movements that were prevalent in the immediate post-war years. Read the full biography

Arturo Carmassi Biography

Born in Lucca on 2 July 1925, he moved with his family to Turin as a child, where he studied at the Fontanesi Landscape School and for a short period at the Albertina Academy. At the beginning of his activity he asserted an independent position within a world (that of the city of Turin) strongly influenced by the neo-cubist movements that were prevalent in the immediate post-war years. After his move to Milan in 1952 (a very cultured city at that time and open to the influences of the international art world) he definitively came into contact with the historical avant-gardes. In this period his works increasingly stood out for their informal character with elements surrealists. His early language is centered on a personal search for formal abstraction. At the end of the sixties, as Raffaele Carrieri highlights, Carmassi's expressive language changes and recovers the objective data of the image, a return to the "representation of the landscape and the figure" which another critic of the period Andrea Alibrandi indicates as figures and stories with references literary works from which his commonality with surrealism shines through, from that period is his friendship with Patrick Wallberg, a poet close to André Breton. The new style focused on the search for mythological forms and evocative images changes again and as Jean-Marie Drot among others notes, in the last decade of the 20th century it tends to become essential. Throughout his career he has been involved in painting, sculpture and engraving, experimenting with different techniques ranging from collage, sand, oils, pens, to the use of unconventional materials such as wax, corrugated cardboard, tar, walnut husk, old fabrics, fence wood. He spent the last years of his life in Fucecchio.