Adolfo Saporetti Biography
Adolfo Saporetti (Ravenna, 25 December 1907 – Milan, 3 December 1974) was an Italian painter. Born in Ravenna in 1907, Adolfo Saporetti studied painting in Paris and from 1940 to 1961 lived in New York, in the famous "burnt triangle" (Greenwich Village), between Blecker Street and Sixth Avenue, sharing the same ideas and taking part in same struggles in which Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas and Varèse were his companions. He died in 1974. Saporetti had dedicated his entire life to painting. Since he was a boy he had revealed his artistic vocation by drawing caricatures in his native Ravenna, where the young Adolfo, Dolfo, Dolfè to his friends, wandered in the socialist world of his father, who had not spared the caricature, among the proud, sanguine, wrapped up in that restless and generous Romagna. But the father soon had to flee to France to save himself from the persecution of the fascists and his son followed him. Thus he grew up in Paris and his vocation as a young painter was formed in a sensitive environment, capable of making an instinctive sensitivity refined, of accustoming to cerebral invention a soul initially devoted to spontaneous impulses which found infinite elegance in intellectualism, losing however, that baggage of convictions that would have allowed him a social testimony, an authentic language. In Paris Adolfo Saporetti frequented the great Italian exiles, Turati, Treves, Nenni, Anna Kuliscioff and their disappointments were not invigorating for his soul. In his artistic acquaintances, proposed by Leonor Fini, his friend, he had relationships with Breton and Tzara which led him to the surrealist experience, approaching which a young man, who was educated in the world of Italian exiles, ended up thinking that reality had to be sought only in imagination, outside of things, above men. In 1939, Saporetti's first solo show opened in Paris at the Galerie De Berri and Filippo de Pisis wanted to present this young painter to the public, underlining the artist's sensitivity, his spirit detached from things, his acute irony. and penetrating of his drawings. And that ironic charge, the fruit of experiences and disillusionments, will never abandon him again, it will remain an unfailing characteristic of his works, almost the limit of his magical hand, capable of a masterly sign, but spiritually agnostic. It was an irony without bitterness, that of Adolfo Saporetti, and in this overcoming of every controversy and every conviction lay his great human dimension, which however renounced any message, a detached spectator, a ruthless but disaffected scrutinizer of the human story. In 1938, still in Paris, Adolfo Saporetti met Anne Jenness, a painter who came from an old American family and came to Europe in search of the sources from which American civilization began. The meeting was definitive. They married and remained together all their lives, moving immediately - the Second World War had broken out - to New York. Here, in a different environment uprooted from any European problem, Saporetti could only move further away from the individual problems, from the human aspects, from the social tensions in the midst of which he had grown up as a young man in Italy and which he had already felt distant and empty. in Paris. Thus he became even more intellectualistic, he lost the relationship with the human, to the point of complete detachment, to the point of reaching his own poetry made up of negations for everything that is usual in the image, in events, in the modesty of the human dimension. By painting a human figure in place of the head he placed a flower, a butterfly, an unreal image, painted with his cold but sovereign mastery. This is how America sent it back to us, in the sixties. He sent him back to Milan, where he met Franco Passoni, who immediately understood the great possibilities and the intimate drama, he pushed him to Versilia, where Vittorio Grotti worked to put back into Saporetti's soul the human interests, the heartbeats, the participations that they had been taken from him, albeit partly sublimated into a dreamy and detached contemplation. In vain. By now Adolfo Saporetti was irrecoverable to human emotions, he had overcome them in his disenchanted evaluation, in a serene, ruthless and hopeless knowledge of the smallness of the soul and the ingenuity of men, of their moral poverty, of their ideological aridity. He continued to paint, to make wonderful paintings, ennobled by his dark mark, of his hand without uncertainties, but without convictions, full of that irony that could be seen in his unforgettable smile, which revealed itself with a sharp glare and dissolved in a silent, discreet, almost modest sadness, all and only hers.
