Still Life

Signed lower right: “Mario Cavaglieri”

Provenance: private collection

A painter of rare elegance and chromatic vigour, Mario Cavaglieri enjoyed a long career divided between Italy and France, supported by widespread recognition and the appreciation of critics such as Roberto Longhi. As early as 1920, on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Galleria Pesaro, Vittorio Pica praised his “decorative sentiment and joyful colouristic fervour, which provide a true and vivid delight to the eyes”[1]. The painter’s career, crowned by a monographic exhibition curated by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti in 1953 at Palazzo Strozzi, was nourished by a personal, mellow and brilliant lexicon that celebrates scenes of social life, elegant figures, rich and sumptuous interiors, still lifes and bourgeois portraits. The bright colours, constructed with a density that is at times material, recall the sumptuous colourism of the Venetian tradition, in a fresh reinterpretation of mid-19th-century realism updated to European painting.

This Still Life fully represents his typical post-Impressionism with its fiery colour range and material consistency, which seems to flow into an almost abstract dimension as the forms are transformed into the pure concreteness of colour that becomes rich and tactile. Especially after his first, fundamental stay in Paris in 1911, following an initial secessionist trend in the early 20th century, Cavaglieri became an interpreter of a post-Impressionism inspired and guided as much by the Nabis, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard as by the Nordic expressionists, such as James Ensor and Emile Nolde, true tutelary deities of his poetics.

The planes overlap, emphasising colour rather than drawing, with a strong expressive tension, especially in the so-called brilliant years, between 1913 and 1922, a decade in which Mario Cavaglieri definitively arrived at a joyful and sumptuous style of painting, which anticipated his move to the estate in Gascony, in Peyloubère in 1925, when he began his most successful period in terms of critical and public acclaim.

A representation, like many from the 1920s and 1930s, set in a refined interior but crammed with objects, Chinese vases, fabrics, carpets, candelabra, furnishings and ebony furniture that reveal not only a taste for horror vacui but also for exoticism. All this is supported by a vortex of vibrant colour and texture that allows us to glimpse only the details of the still life through a play of thicknesses and solids and voids that harmonise to create areas of shadow and light. Giorgio Bassani’s words on “comparison” in 1953, although referring to the 1915 painting La sala disabitata (The Uninhabited Room), also perfectly describe the still lifes and interiors of the immediately following period in France: “Everything has come to life: […] every object accumulated within these walls by centuries of leisure, by a taste that is still confident, shines, for a few moments, ephemeral and immortal”.

The painter returned to Italy only during the Second World War, before returning to France in 1946. His critical acclaim grew steadily throughout the 1950s, until Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti decided to dedicate a solo exhibition to him in Florence in 1953. In 1967, the critic curated the exhibition “Modern Art in Italy 1915-1935” at Palazzo Strozzi, which included fifteen works by Mario Cavaglieri, celebrating him for the last time before his death in 1969.

[1] V. Pica, Mostra individuale di H. St. LERCHE – A. MARTINI – M. CAVALIERI, Milan, Galleria Pesaro, 1920.

Elena Lago