Maceo Casadei Biography
Maceo Casadei was born in Forlì in 1899. At a young age he was a pupil of the painter Giovanni Marchini in Forlì. Marchini founded the Cenacolo Artistico Forlivese in 1920, with which Casadei collaborated and participated in the "Autumn Art Exhibition" of 1922. In 1912 Casadei and his family emigrated to Lyon, France, where he attended the Free School of the Nude and friendship with Pietro Angelini from Forlì, who also emigrated to France. Angelini and Casadei worked together and Casadei showed particular interest in the Lyonnais landscape painters. Casadei and Angelini met again in Rome in the second half of the 1930s. After the First World War, Casadei returned to Lyon before settling again in Forlì to devote himself to painting. He also worked as a photograph retoucher and in the 1920s and 1930s he alternated between Forlì and Lyon, painting murals and theater scenes as needed. In 1934 he was hired as a make-up artist by the Istituto Nazionale Luce in Rome, chaired by Giacomo Paulucci de Calboli, of a noble family from Forlì. There, he designed several exhibition pavilions. In 1941 he was sent to the front as a war reporter. From 1941 to 1943 he took thousands of photographs and produced personal works of war-related subjects. These pieces were exhibited in 1942 at the Galleria Il Milione in Milan. During his decisive artistic period in Rome, Maceo created still lifes, female nudes, urban views and war scenes, which he presented in numerous Roman exhibitions. He also collaborates with Giacomo Balla and Mario Sironi as a poster designer and meets Mario Mafai. In 1937 two of his works were purchased by the Ministry of Education and exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. Casadei's paintings summarize the influences of Camille Corot and the nineteenth-century painters of the Roman countryside, as well as photographic and cinematographic practices and contacts with the School of Rome. His style was sumptuous for lyrical relaxation and, at the same time, fibrillating for subtle and unexpected variations in tonal timbres and formal manipulations of the subject that were never exaggerated but carefully calculated. From 1946 to 1947 he lived in Venice, where he frequented Filippo De Pisis. At the beginning of the 1950s he settled permanently in Forlì and undertook an intense promotional activity in the field of visual arts. In 1959 he executed his most significant decorative work in the Church of the Servi di Maria in Rome. Admired for his exceptional pictorial skills and exclusive stylistic expression, Maceo became the artistic spirit of Forlì and contributed to re-establishing a more appropriate appreciation of his work in the broader field of twentieth-century Italian art. Casadei was a painter with rare synthetic abilities, characterized by an extremely refined use of color, who excelled in the figurative tradition of the 20th century, referring firmly to the real world and translating it into a highly refined painting, capable of capturing those perfect moments in where even the most prosaic, ordinary and familiar elements - a line along the road, a billboard, a door painted pink or a dress in the crowd - become openings into the marvelous, into a fictitious artistic space that transcends documentaryism.
