Vittorio Corona Biography
Vittorio Corona was born in Palermo in 1901. His artistic journey began in Palermo at the end of the 1910s, guided by the painter Giovanni Varvaro. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts, obtaining a qualification to teach drawing, but soon moved away from the academic environment to come into contact with the futurists. Between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, he became one of the best-known painters of the "Second Futurism", establishing his personal style in works highly appreciated by FT Marinetti and Giacomo Balla. In the mid-1930s, due to family needs, he was forced to leave Palermo and accept teaching positions around Italy, settling definitively in Rome in 1956. In this period, although isolated from the official artistic circuits, he continued to work intensely , dedicating himself to the reconstruction and reworking of Futurist works lost during the bombing of Palermo, as well as creating a notable series of new oil paintings, tempera paintings, watercolors and drawings. In 1926 he opened an art house in Palermo together with his wife Gigia, author of refined tapestries designed by her husband. Since 1927 he has participated in the main national and international futurist exhibitions and in the most important Italian painting exhibitions, with works such as The Fall of the Stars, Sea Wave + Sirens, Vegetation, Armor of Love, Aerial Dynamism, Supermarine and Gusts of Wind, which he achieved considerable success. Eva di Stefano writes in Vittorio Corona (Sellerio, 1983), "the relationship between Vittorio Corona and Futurism, which in the fifties and sixties developed into a particular form of "neofuturism", was analyzed by Enrico Crispolti in the monograph Vittorio Corona through Futurism (Celebes, 1978) which provided "for the first time an adequate historical-critical profile" of the painter. "Corona, outside of the official exhibitions, the noise and the controversies... expressed his love for nature and life in hundreds of watercolors, many drawings and paintings... Perhaps only such painful solitude and a life so burdensome they could have allowed the artist to find himself with nature and poetry, in such a direct, simple and essential way. The sweetness of the touch, the subtle trace of the drawing, the grace and naturalness of the image emphasized the viewer. Painting these watercolors must have helped him to live, rest and exalt himself. Now they have the power to console others, as only art can do."
