Emanuele Cavalli Biography
Emanuele Cavalli (1904 - 1981) was an Italian painter. Coming from a family of landowners, in 1921 he moved to Rome. After his first studies at the industrial art institute, he entered the school of the painter Felice Carena. In 1926 three of his works were accepted by the jury of the Venice Biennale (from this moment his participation in this exhibition was almost continuous). He made his debut in 1927, with Capogrossi and F. Di Cocco, exhibiting at the Dinesen pension, arousing considerable interest. In 1928 he went to France, where he was introduced to the environment of the Italiens de Paris (De Pisis, De Chirico, Savinio etc.); here he exhibited at the Salon Bovy together with Pirandello and Di Cocco. In 1930 he was back in Rome. The years 1931-33 are fundamental for the development and affirmation of tonalism, an aesthetic and pictorial direction that finds in Cavalli one of the most refined and also most aware interpreters from a theoretical point of view. A series of exhibitions were important for the affirmation of the current: at the Galleria di Roma (May and December 1932: two group exhibitions in which they were already present, alongside Cagli and Capogrossi), at the Milanese gallery Il Milione (February 1933: Cagli exhibited again , Capogrossi and C.), at the Parisian gallery J. Bonjean (December 1933). In 1933 Capogrossi, Cavalli and Melli (as critic) together drew up the "Manifesto of Plastic Primordialism" in which they expressed their ideas on tonal painting, with a strong emphasis on the spiritual and abstract side of the pictorial operation. Over time, Cavalli developed the theme of the painting-music relationship: on the occasion of the Quadrennial of 1943, he presented a series of nine female figures, each dressed in a different shade, and explained his work in terms of "contrapuntal sensitivity", comparing it to a "collection of preludes and fugues in major and minor keys". These years of intense and fruitful activity were crowned by two important solo exhibitions (at the Leonardo da Vinci gallery in Florence in 1939 and at the Zodiaco in Rome in 1945) and by victory in the competition for the chair of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence (1945). The artist moved to this city with his wife Vera. 1949, with the failure to renew his teaching position, marks the beginning of a profound crisis, which is not unrelated to the abstractionist orientation that his old traveling companions, Cagli and Capogrossi, then began to follow.
