Still Life with Fish (1947)

Signed upper right: “Afro 47”

Exhibitions: 1987, Spoleto, Palazzo Rosari Spada

Bibliography: Afro fino al 1952, exhibition catalogue edited by B. Mantura and P. Rosazza Ferraris (Spoleto, Palazzo Rosari Spada, 27 June – 6 September 1987), Milan, Mondadori, 1987, no. 36 (illustrated).

Provenance: Libero De Libero Collection

Still Life with Fish, painted in 1947, represents one of Afro’s last figurative works before he turned to abstract art in 1948. Throughout the 1950s, he maintained a balance between mimicry and abstraction, with poetic, suspended, light compositions that found their origins both in his tonalist phase of the 1930s and in his neo-cubist phase of the 1940s, of which this Still Life is an example. A “timely homage to Braque”[1], the work truly reflects that synthetic and condensed version of Cubism in which elements overlap and intertwine, constantly bearing in mind classical iconographic references.

In the year he joined the New Front of the Arts, he arrived at a “subtle rhythmic reworking of Cubism” [2], a clear evolution from the still lifes of the 1930s, which were deeply linked to Corrado Cagli’s tonal and harmonious colourism, because by now the mark emerges lucid and sharp, and the clear, non-perspective spatial solutions absorb the light in clear and synthetic areas of colour. The war had ended just over two years earlier, and Afro expressed a tension that gradually distanced him from canonical figuration.

The memories of Picasso and Braque, studied during his trip to Paris in 1937-1938, are clear, but Afro adds echoes of an accentuated lyricism – which can be seen perfectly in the combination of dark tones contrasting with the bright yellow of the background and the more subtle yellow of the lemons , bringing Renaissance and Mannerist still life back to life, reinterpreting the chiaroscuro relationships and the stridency of Tintoretto (alive in his Venetian training) and remaining faithful to a compositional line that is both expressive and solid. It is impossible not to find references to Matisse’s Fauvism (which Afro had seen at the Jeu de Paume together with Picasso and Braque in 1938) in the choice of colours, through the use of pure colour distributed in flat but constructive backgrounds based on contrasts. Still Life with Fish therefore corresponds to the culminating moment in which Afro oriented his pictorial investigation towards post-Cubist language as a means of decomposing the figure and space, fully adhering to the theses of the New Front of the Arts, which advocated the use of a new lexicon, in contrast to the return to order of previous decades and sprouted from the experiences of Cézanne to those of the second post-Cubism. The desire to free the pictorial surface from mimetic limitations finally manifested itself after 1947 and even more so after his trip to America in 1950, when he chose a fully informal dimension.

[1] Afro fino al 1952, exhibition catalogue edited by B. Mantura and P. Rosazza Ferraris (Spoleto, Palazzo Rosari Spada, 27 June – 6 September 1987), Milan, Mondadori, 1987, work description, no. 36.

[2] L. Trucchi, Afro Basaldella. Rome, Gallery of Modern Art, “Società Belle Arti”, April–May 1978.

Elena Lago