Amelia Almagià Ambron (Ancona 1877-Rome 1960) - Flowers
Oil painting on canvas signed lower right and dated 1941
Amelia Almagià Ambron was born in Ancona in 1877 to an Italian-Jewish family. The family is well-off and encourages the love of painting in Amelia and her sisters. Amelia, a talented painter, trained at the school of Antonio Mancini, a Roman painter in the Verist style. Her life takes place between Rome and Alexandria in Egypt, before her marriage to Aldo Ambron, which leads her to settle in Rome.
Appreciated for her luminous portraits and airy landscapes, she is the undisputed point of reference of a lively cultural salon attended by numerous artists including Marinetti, Giovanni Colacicchi, Mario Tozzi, and Mancini himself. Bound by a deep and fraternal friendship with Giacomo Balla (protagonist of the early Futurist period), she hosts the master and his family for a long time in the Cotorniano estate in the Sienese countryside and later, from 1926 to 1929, at Villa Ambron in Parioli. Numerous postcards and letters sent by Balla to Amelia's family document the intense bond between the two families.
Amelia has three children, Emilio, Nora, and Gilda, all passionate about art. Emilio will become a highly appreciated artist. A restless traveler between Europe, Africa, and Asia, Emilio will be the spokesman for a return to classicism and the figure in the post-war period.
Amelia dies in Rome in 1960.
She lived a double role that was discriminatory in her time: that of a woman - in an era when society was oppressive for women, destined exclusively to domestic life and discouraged if not even hindered in the attempt to cultivate their aspirations and emerge in the cultural field, a sector where men were considered the sole depositaries of true professionalità - and that of a Jew. Instead of becoming an obstacle, the condition of social minority turns into an impulse to affirmation and creative independence.
In 2012 there was the exhibition "Balla/Ambron. The Twenties between Rome and Cotorniano", at the Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro Foundation in Bologna. In 2014 her works were present in the exhibition "Twentieth-Century Women Artists between vision and Jewish identity" at the Galleria d'arte Moderna in Rome.