Virgilio Guizzi Biography
Virgilio Guizzi (1902 - 1978) born in Molfetta (Bari) in 1902, passed away in Rome in 1978. Painter, art critic, essayist. He arrived in the capital around 1910. He had his first creative experiences with sculpture. At the end of the twenties, after graduating in literature and philosophy in 1926 with Adolfo Venturi and Giovanni Gentile, he exhibited his paintings for the first time. In 1931 he participated in the first Quadrennial of National Art with the painting La Natura. At the Quadrennial in 1935 he was awarded a prize for criticism and in 1943 one for painting. Likewise, for the first time in 1934 (and until the 1950s when, invited, he decided not to participate), he exhibited at the Venice Biennale. From the 1930s to the 1950s he also exhibited at the Milan Triennials. Starting from a meditation in a nineteenth-century key, Guzzi did not take long to mature his vision on the shores of a certain twentieth-centuryism, to then reach the phase of the Roman School, to which he gave his contribution from an existential and realist perspective, overcoming the concept of tonalism. In 1940, he was responsible for a group exhibition at the "Galleria di Roma" (Guttuso, Guzzi, Montanarini, Tamburi, Ziveri and Fazzini) which virtually and properly closed the fervent experience of the Roman School to start that of realism. In 1945, with the aim of updating the values of art, with Enrico Prampolini and Josef Jarema he founded "Art Club", while painting, like that of many of his generation, turned towards those European openings which, referring to Fauves experiences, although proposes grafts of cubist memory. Reality, in any case, has always been his reference. In 1963 he was called to join the National Academy of San Luca, becoming its president in 1975.
