Exotic Dancer (1934)

Signed and dated on the base: ‘II – Aurelio Capsoni Milano XII’.

Exhibitions: 1937, First exhibition of Milanese War Mutilated Artists, Milan, Galleria Pesaro.

Bibliography: Prima mostra degli Artisti Mutilati di Guerra Milanesi, exhibition catalogue (Milan, Galleria Pesaro, November 1937), Milan, 1937, p. 18, no. 3.

Defined by Leonardo Dudreville as ‘a priest of art […] an idealist, a humanist […] all aimed at reaching a higher and better sphere through brute matter’[1], Aurelio Capsoni was a prolific Milanese sculptor who was particularly active in the Lombardy area between the two wars. Well-known in the funerary and public sphere – he was the author of several funerary monuments in Milan’s Monumental Cemetery and several war memorials in the 1920s – he was a Brera professor and exhibited on rare occasions between the 1920s and 1930s. A very rare and therefore precious testimony of his exhibition activity and sculptural production with a non-monumental approach is this terracotta of Exotic Dancer, exhibited by the author in 1937 at the First Exhibition of Milanese War Mutilated Artists at the Pesaro Gallery, together with Tigretta, Madonnina and Eva prima del peccato.

Wounded during the First World War, he participated in the exhibition, as the introductory text states ‘because the exhibitors, although proudly united by the indissoluble bond of the sacrifice made in the days of war for the great common Mother – Italy – [… ] in this their first exhibition, as always, they proclaim and confirm the independence of art from the personal merits of those who serve it, an independence that shines in the orbit of human life like the sun on earth, the perennial gift of that Unknown Nume whose name is Beauty‘[2].

Madonnina and Eva prima del peccato, works illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, present, compared to the figures of the war memorials of the 1920s, denoted by a naturalism charged with spiritual and symbolic tensions, a solid plasticism and a primitivist trend that bring it closer to the full and poetic volumes of Arturo Martini, which returns in the rough and archaic treatment of the masses, poses, and hair styles. The Exotic Dancer, executed in 1934, as can be deduced from the number ‘XII’ next to the signature indicating the twelfth fascist year since the march on Rome, documents Capsoni’s interest in colonial Italy – also legible in the work Exotic Vision exhibited at the 5th Exhibition of the Interprovincial Fascist Syndicate of Fine Arts of Lombardy in 1934. Primitivist expressiveness and exotic scent come together here in a terracotta with a dry, incisive surface and full, balanced volumes that describe the bust of the dancer. The enigmatic, almost sphinx-like face, the frontal pose, the braid adorning the face, the large bracelets and the hands crossed behind the head make this sculpture almost mysterious and reveal a strong affinity with the pose and iconography of Primula, a tapered and equally hermetic sculpture by Attilio Selva of 1924, which Capsoni must have seen in the Mostra Convegno d’Arte Pittura e Scultura at the Galleria Pesaro in Milan in 1930.

Tribal dances imagined or seen by Capsoni, Orientalist memories or narratives, no longer picturesque and dreamy as they often were in the 19th century, but real, documented and tangible, from colonial lands in Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. The components of stylisation and archaism, borrowed from Martini’s examples and filtered through Selvi’s iconography, are transformed here in the choice of a simple material and in the exciting and essential simplification of forms, for the execution of a figure that is as fascinating as it is sibylline.

[1] L. Dudreville, The Young. Aurelio Capsoni, ‘Il secolo illustrato. Rivista quindicinale della forza, dell’audacia e dell’energia umana’, 19, 1922, p. 569.

[2] A. Gorini, Prima mostra degli Artisti mutilati di guerra milanesi, exhibition catalogue (Milan, Galleria Pesaro, November 1937), Milan, 1937.