Large plate "DOMENICO CANTATORE"

Large terracotta plate by DOMENICO CANTATORE LIMITED SERIES 12/50 DIAMETER 50CM TELEPHONE CONTACT REQUESTED Born and raised in Ruvo di Puglia, he was the last son of a family of eight children[1]. He suffered hunger and poverty, however at 18, under the encouragement of Benedetto Nardi, he became a room decorator[2]. From Puglia, however, in 1922 he moved first to Rome, where he joined his brother Giuseppe Cantatore (1892-1942), also a painter, and then to Milan in 1925, where he began to paint and frequent the group of artists linked to the artistic and literary movement Corrente and in 1930 he held his first solo show at the Galleria d'arte moderna[2]. In the Lombard capital he became a close friend of Carlo Carrà, Alfonso Gatto, Leonardo Sinisgalli of the Nobel Prize for Literature Salvatore Quasimodo[1] and the candidate for the Nobel Prize in the same sector Hrand Nazariantz, an Armenian poet exiled in Puglia after the Armenian genocide, to whom he also dedicated a portrait, now lost, of which some photographic reproductions remain. He was an intimate friend especially of Raffaele Carrieri, from Puglia like him[3]. Thanks to the help of a friend, in 1932 he moved, poor, to Paris, where he deeply understood the Impressionists, as well as the painting of Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Henri Matisse, therefore the Fauves current[1]. Here he also met the Italians Carlo Levi and Filippo de Pisis[1], but of the Parisian period only a notebook and some drypoints (engraving technique) remain. Returning to Milan, in 1934 he exhibited the drawings of the Parisian period at the Galleria del Milione[4]. Becoming famous at European level, in 1940 he was awarded, for clear fame, the chair of Figure at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera[3], thus succeeding Aldo Carpi[1] chair that he offered to his student Natale Addamiano in 1976. In 1948 he met Giorgio Morandi, from whom he assimilated realism[3]. He subsequently participated in the Bergamo Prize, the Venice Biennale, where they dedicated personal walls and rooms to him, and the Rome Quadriennale, where he became part of the commission for the invitations of the VII edition of 1955. In 1956 he went to Spain where he rediscovered the warm and luminous colors of the South, so from this moment until the eighties he focused particularly on landscapes and human figures[3]: the undisputed protagonist of his works was his South, abandoned at a young age but brought back to life on his canvases, painting sunsets, hilly landscapes but above all his "gnarled" men of the South, the confreres and rites of the Ruvese Holy Week and the women, sometimes from the South and dressed in black, or his sinuous "odalisques". Cantatore also put himself to the test as a writer, putting down in black and white his memories of a boy from Ruvo, first on the pages of L'Ambrosiano, then collecting his stories in books[2], such as Il pittore di stanze in 1944 and Ritorno al paese in 1966. In 1965, in fact, a large event was organized in Ruvo di Puglia in his honor, in which Quasimodo also took part, shortly after being awarded the Nobel Prize[5]; for the occasion, some documentaries on the life of the painter were screened and Cantatore himself, present at the meeting, was awarded a gold medal[5]. Continuing to teach, he starred in other exhibitions and returned more frequently to visit his native country. With them he shared the technique combined with the subjects that have made him popular and easily recognizable. For many years I have been assiduously frequenting in the summer periods the Marche region and MONTEFIORE dell Aso where part of his family of origin resided and where he was inspired for many of his landscapes; from these stays, according to the artist, he found new lymph for his work and, as a sign of his gratitude, he donated to the Municipality a collection of graphic works now jealously guarded inside the "Polo museale di san Francesco", next to works by Carlo Crivelli (famous triptych of the 1400s) and Adolfo De Carolis, a famous painter from Montefiore. He died on May 22, 1998 while visiting the places of his youth in Paris, at the age of 92[1].