M. Simonetti Biography
Masi Simonetti (1903 - 1969) was an Italian painter born in Zoppè di Cadore in 1903 and forced to emigrate as a boy, first to Pavia and then to Milan. In 1925 he moved to Paris, where in 1930 he participated in the Salon des Indépendents. The first personal exhibitions in Paris were those of the Galerie Carmine (1937), the Galerie Le Niveau (1943) and the Galerie Carpentier (1944). From 1945 to 1948 he assiduously attended Sonia Terk Delaunay's club. In 1947 he participated in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, where Jean Arp, Albert Gleizes, Kupka, Pevsner, Francis Picabia, Alberto Magnelli, Hans Hartung, Serge Poliakoff and others also exhibited. In the same year, he met the Italian painter Orazio Orazi in Paris, with whom he took a trip to Italy in 1950 to discover the most important museums. In 1968, struck by an incurable disease, he returned to Paris, where he died on 21 February 1969. Simonetti has always been deeply linked to his mountain origins, expressing narratives of rural life in his works since his beginnings, in the 1920s. Over time, refining his pictorial quality, he created a series of critical works on the change in the man-mountain relationship following modernity which had brought profound transformations to local tradition.
