Leonardo Cremonini

Leonardo Cremonini

Leonardo Cremonini (born November 26, 1925 in Bologna , † April 12, 2010 in Paris ) was an Italian painter .

life and work

Leonardo Cremonini was the son of a railroad worker and amateur painter who showed him the basics of painting at an early age. In 1935 the father was transferred professionally; the family moved to Paola . The Tyrrhenian coast made a deep and lasting impression on him; it appears again and again as a theme in his later work.

Supported by a scholarship from the Collegio Venturoli , he studied from 1932 to 1936 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, and then at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan . In 1948 he had his first exhibition in Verona .

In Bologna he met Giorgio Morandi . Thanks to his sponsorship, he received another scholarship, which enabled him to stay in Paris in 1951. In the same year, his works were exhibited there at the Center for Italian Art. However, he found his first customers in the USA; as a result of an exhibition in the gallery of Catherine Viviano in 1952. This gallery held three more exhibitions of his work in the following 10 years.

In his early years he followed Giorgio Morandi, Mario Sironi and Felice Casorati in his style . The painting of Francis Bacon also influenced him considerably, although it was not highly regarded at the time, as did Bernard Lorjou in the field of contemporary French art. His early works, of expressionist appearance, show tortured bodies and skinned animals. Over time, his style evolved into intellectual refinement.

In 1960, an exhibition at the Galerie du Dragon in Paris brought his works back to the French public. In the 1960s he joined the movement of figuration narrative , the narrative representation . His art was well received and critically appreciated by a number of well-known French and Italian writers and men of letters. Those who wrote essays, analyzes, and reviews of his work included Louis Althusser , Michel Butor , Italo Calvino , Régis Debray, and Marc Le Bot . The latter gave him a book and, of even greater influence, an entire lecture schedule in his course on the history of contemporary art at the University of Paris I . Umberto Eco was amazed at this extraordinary reception - and joined the series of Cremonini interpreters. Cremonini's art is “painterly”, says Eco, due to the large-scale, geometrical division of the image, large gaps, and the dissolution of the material bodies. She narrates, creates ambiguous entanglements and subliminal visual chains of thought on the role of the subject, the gaze, desire and lust. Other critics compared him to Balthus .

At first glance, many of his pictures show children playing carelessly. At second glance you can see that they are in a precarious position: on the unconfident balustrade of a high balcony, near a cupboard under which there is a sharp-edged sign shaped like an arrow, or behind a door frame loving adult couple watching. A particularly treacherous picture does not show the children directly, but rather on a traffic sign, be careful children ; the traffic light at the pedestrian crossing is orange , in front of it are huge cars, impatiently waiting, and a ball is rolling over the crossing.

In 1969 the first major retrospective was dedicated to him in the Palais des beaux-arts in Brussels . Over the years, retrospectives followed in Paris, Milan, Prague , Tokyo and Basel , among others .

In 1983 Cremonini was appointed director of the studio at the École des beaux-arts in Paris. The then culture minister Jack Lang linked this with the intention of opening up the traditional university more to contemporary art. Paradoxically, in the years that followed, his art closed itself to current trends. He did not like to make friends with the wild, so-called free art of the following generation, embodied by artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat , Robert Combas or Hervé di Rosa . “Painting must not make noise”, he wrote in 1980, “because only doubt is dynamic.” His own late works are still figurative, but arranged with the utmost precision. He now paid more attention to the light, glaring and overwhelmingly powerful in the form of the sun on the Aeolian Islands , or washed out by the fog in Trouville , where he often stayed.

In 2001 he was accepted as an external member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts .

literature

• Harry Bellet: Leonardo Cremonini . Le Monde , April 20, 2010, page 23

Web links

• Literature by and about Leonardo Cremonini in the catalog of the German National Library
• Leonardo Cremonini in the Encyclopédie audiovisuelle de l'art contemporain (French)

References and comments

1. ↑ “Sa peinture ... est éminemment“ picturale ”(larges étalements, écarts, partitions gémétriques et effacements de la matière), ... elle raconte, organise des intrigues ambiguës et sousentend une série de raisonnements (visuels bien sûr) sur le rôle du sujet, du regard, du désir et de la volupté. »Quoted from Henri Bellet in Le Monde, April 20, 2010, p. 23
2. ↑ “La peinture doit éviter de faire du bruit, car seul le doute est dynamique. »Le Monde, April 20, 2010, p. 23