The atmosphere is that of painting en plein air, evoked by the parasol and clothing of the young woman in the foreground, by the folding chair on which the bare-breasted model is seated and by the large hat worn by the woman standing in the distance. 

With the same format, provenance and exhibition history, these two paintings form a sort of diptych within the Cerruti Collection. Massimo Campigli called both works Composizione, introducing the title in 1942 during his solo exhibition at the Galleria Barbaroux in Milan, where he presented a group of recent small frescoes. The word emphasises the combinatorial nature of his painterly language, focused on the female figure reproduced in a broad spectrum of variants. In the monograph on the artist of 1958, published by Venicebased Edizioni del Cavallino, Umbro Apollonio wrote about a “signature-woman”, an “archetype” whose multiple appearances are permeated by a diverse range of sources, from Cubism, assimilated in “monosyllables” and “themes” during his formative years in Paris, to the “gentle smile” borrowed from Etruscan painting.¹ Throughout the 1940s, Campigli subjected his figures to progressive simplification, thereby going back to highlighting their primary formal templates: ancient amphorae, Cycladic figurines, Cubist guitars. Within a setting of stylistic continuity, this typification process is related to a phase of summing-up and self-reflection, stimulated over the course of the decade by the preparation of numerous publications and by major exhibitions, including his solo show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1946, which then travelled to the Bojimans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, by the 1947 retrospective at the Galleria L’Obelisco in Rome and by his solo space at the Venice Biennale in 1948. 

The first Composizione captures two women in a moment of complicity. They are united by an evident yet discreet gesture, which is both one of greeting and contact. The young woman facing us has extended her hand to her companion, seen from behind, and seems intent upon fixing her necklace as she looks her in the eyes. Beneath the gaze, that spontaneous action draws the two bodies closer and joins them in an intimate and close relationship. The pose of the raised arm, with its diagonal composition, adds movement to the painting’s narrative structure and composition, emphasising its symmetry through contrast. Within the accentuated two-dimensionality, it is an aspect that places the figures inside the space, adding an effect of overall volume. The mirrored pairing of the neck and face have two almost identical outlines, cut out in the typical hourglass shape, in its turn echoed by the lozenges of the background, with an effective visual alternation of concave and convex. The marked sketchiness of the outlines and the patterns of the clothes recall the sculptural and rather stony graphic elements that Campigli was experimenting with at the same time in the field of lithography, revealing similarities with some of the plates he produced to illustrate the book dedicated to Sappho’s Lyric Poetry in 1944 (fig. 1).² The linear decoration of the clothing evokes the abstract iconography of the fabrics, rugs and stone inlays, with the latter studied in the cartoons for mosaics, as in the case of the one designed by the artist and developed at the Milan Triennale in 1940. The reduction in signs leaves the texture of the painting unchanged, layered in thick and rough pastes, and likewise the palette, which is dominated by whites and earths as usual. 

The variegated and resonating background of the 1947 painting leads on to the more uniform and monotonal background of the 1948 Composizione. Its pale setting, delimited on three sides by a soft yellow brushstroke, evokes a beach, a theme dear to Campigli who produced a famous version of it in his Le spose dei marinai (Brides of Sailors) in 1934, in the collection of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale.³ The figures arranged one after the other are three iconographic constants, introduced as early as the 1920s, with which the artist sets out a discourse on art on the small canvas. The atmosphere is that of painting en plein air, evoked by the parasol and clothing of the young woman in the foreground, by the folding chair on which the bare-breasted model is seated and by the large hat worn by the woman standing in the distance. By using this anachronistic set-up, Campigli takes back possession of the places and rituals typical of Impressionist and Post- Impressionist painting. He reinterprets a founding tradition of the history of modern art, citing Georges Seurat’s legendary Grande Jatte: “the great love of my life”, as he confided in his autobiography.⁴ 

Sourced on the Milanese market, respectively from the Galleria Cairola and the Galleria del Naviglio, the two Composizioni entered the collection of the Galleria Gissi in Turin, which exhibited them in 1962 in a collective exhibition entitled Maestri del Novecento. They were the first two works by the artist to be purchased by Francesco Federico Cerruti, probably as early as the 1960s. 

Giorgina Bertolino

¹ Apollonio 1958, np.

² See in particular “Preghiera ad Afrodite”, in Saffo 1944.

³ Campigli 2013, vol. II, p. 475, no. 34-029.

⁴ Id. 1995, p. 41.