Fausto melotti biography of william

Fausto Melotti (1901-1986) was an Italian painter and sculptor who is best known for his slender brass sculptures and small ceramics.

In 1915, he moved with his family to Florence, where he started his academic education, obtaining a degree in Electrotechnic Engineering in 1924.

Thanks to Léonce Rosenberg, he consolidated himself as a prominent artist in France and received the La Sarraz International Prize in Switzerland in 1937.

After witnessing the destruction of the Second World War, Melotti felt it necessary to introduce the human figure into his work. It was at the time of the Florence exhibition that Italo Calvino wrote Gli effimeri, a text dedicated to Melotti’s work of the same name: “A score of weightless ideograms like water insects that seem to whirl on a brass structure screened by gauze thread”.

It is around this time that he increasingly became interested in the field of sculpture, deeply influenced by his early education, that introduced him to the art of Renaissance, and by the hand of Italian sculptor Pietro Canonica, who he frequently visited in Torino.

Because of this artistic passion, Melotti enrolled in the Accademia di Brera, graduating in 1928, meeting and befriending Lucio Fontana, with whom he would collaborate until Fontana’s passing in 1968.

In the interwar years, Melotti became a leading member of the group of Milanese abstract artists which also included Fontana.

That same year Melotti joined Abstraction-Création, the movement founded in Paris in 1931 by Van Doesburg, Seuphor, Vantogerloo with the aim of championing the work of non-figurative artists. studio (Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressuti, Rogers), named the Constant Man. In this, twelve sculptures are set at regular intervals in a work in which colour, words and planes are harmonized in an environmental installation.
Between 1941 and 1943 he lived in Rome where he participated in the Figini and Pollini project for the Palazzo delle Forze Armate and, in the meantime, produced drawings, paintings and poems that were together published as Il Triste Minotauro by Giovanni Schweiller in 1944.

In 1979, he participated in an anthological exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and in 1981, he participated in a similar exhibition at Forte di Belvedere in Florence. Also in 1935, Melotti was among the Milanese artists who exhibited at the first group show of abstract art in the studio of Casorati and Paulucci in Turin, and held a solo show in the Galleria del Milione in Milan of sculpture of rigorously contrapuntal inspiration.

At this point, Melotti initiated a 15-year prolific period in which he created numerous ceramic and terra-cotta sculptures moving away from pure abstraction and using a more expressive language.

During the late 1940s, Melotti further developed his characteristic refined technique, and became highly successful. In 1967 he exhibited a number of newly inspired sculptures at the Galleria Toninelli in Milan.

This marked the start of a series of exhibitions in Italy and abroad that quickly brought him success and public awareness of his multifaceted art: sculptures, low reliefs, theatre sculptures, ceramics and works on paper.
In 1975 Adelphi published a series of his writings and poems under the title Linee which, in the same year, won the Diano Marina Prize.

In 1932 he agreed to give a course in modern plastic arts at the Scuola artigianale in Cantù. By this time, Melotti was already recognized as a pivotal figure in modern and contemporary sculpture by critics and artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Alexander Calder, among others.

In 1974, Melotti published his book Linee, which included many of his writings and poems and awarded him the Diano Marina Prize in 1975.

That same year, he participated in the VI Triennale di Milano (Milan Triennial) with 12 sculptures in an installation for the Sala della Coerenza, designed by the Milanese architecture and design shop Studio BBPR (Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressuti, Rogers).

Migration To A More Figurative Style

During most of World War II Melotti lived in Rome, but after a 1943 bomb raid on Milan destroyed his Milanese studio, he decided to renovate it and to install a muffle kiln.

His 1967 solo show at the Galleria Toninelli in Milan enhanced Melotti’s figure, re-gaining the attention of the public, and, in particular, becoming the interest of young people. His œvre was internationally recognised, obtaining the Rembrandt Prize of the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Foundation, Basel in 1974 and the 15th European Prize Umberto Biancamano in 1977.

Fausto Melotti (born June 8, 1901, Rovereto, Italy–died June 22, 1986, Milan) was a seminal Italian post-war ceramicist, sculptor, painter, and poet, and is considered a key contributor in establishing European Modernism.

In 1979 a solo anthological exhibition was held at the Palazzo Reale in Milan and two years later, in Florence, an exhibition was staged at the Forte Belvedere. A strong professional and personal relationship was created in this period with Gio Ponti, with whom he worked on two large projects for the Villa Planchart in Caracas (1956) and the Villa Nemazee in Teheran (1960).