Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, June 20, 2022: Bruno Croatto, an Italian painter (#1600)

Bruno Croatto (1875 – 1948) was born in Trieste, at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He perfected his training at the Munich Academy, where he received on the one hand the stimuli of the stylistic movement of the Secession, of Max Liebermann and Franz von Stuck; on the other hand the classicism of Anselm Feuerbach, through which he introjects the lessons of the Italian and Flemish masters of the fifteenth century. After having made his debut in Trieste in 1897 he participates in the Venice Biennale, where he will be present continuously between 1912 and 1924. Among the first known works is the Portrait of the Sleeping Mother, a pastel that is influenced by Munch's lesson. Around 1908 he moved to Orvieto, where he became friends with Umberto Prencipe and specialized in etching and aquatint, then traveling around Italy and mainly making drawings and engravings, including multiple views of Rome, Venice and Trieste. At the outbreak of the First World War, in order not to serve under Austria, he is hospitalized in an asylum.

The postwar period
In the first postwar period he approaches the magical realism theorized by Massimo Bontempelli. The technical expertise and love for detail learned through the art of engraving and the in-depth study of the ancient masters converge in a pictorial figure that freezes the realistic image in an alienated and dreamlike dimension: as artists did in the same years such as Antonio Donghi, Felice Casorati and Cagnaccio di San Pietro. All this in tune with the return to classical sobriety theorized by the magazine "Valori plastici". The works of the early twenties are mostly still lifes and portraits, of which his wife Ester Igea Finzi, becomes the protagonist and inspiration to a sophisticated bourgeois audience . It will probably be thanks to such high-ranking acquaintances that the painter will later succeed in stealing his wife, a Jew from Trieste, from the harmful consequences of the racial laws.

The Roman period
In 1925 he moved to Rome, where he will reside for the rest of his days. Although he integrates into the Roman environment and does not formally adhere to a specific movement, his work maintains a certain affinity with that of other Trieste artists, imbued with Central European culture, who look to the New Objectivity and the twentieth century: such as Piero Marussig, Carlo Sbisà , Cesare Sofianopulo, Mario Lannes, Oscar Hermann Lamb. His work begins to be known also abroad and in 1929 his first solo exhibition is successfully inaugurated in Paris, where he is now presented as a "Roman painter".

His studio-house in via del Babuino 114 is frequented by an elite audience who are often the protagonists of his portraits: such as the art critic Francesco Sapori, Count Ernesto Vitetti, Pietro Mascagni. The precious fabrics, the jewels, the fashionable hairstyles, the Murano glass, the chinoiserie characterize the female portraits indoors or on a landscape background: in harmony with the characteristic taste of her very refined still lifes. There are also numerous self-portraits with which the artist often represents himself holding the tools of the trade.

Enormous success accompanied him until his death. The following year he was celebrated in two important retrospectives at the Roman galleries La Barcaccia and Trieste and was considered a precursor of the future manner of Gregorio Sciltian and Pietro Annigoni.

His Works are preserved in various international collections and museums: among them, in Italy, the Revoltella Civic Museum in Trieste, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan.

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