“[...] My work is fragmentary and as yet uncertain, but necessary to discover the most genuine and essential qualities of my soul.”

Felice Carena included eight “still lifes” among the thirty-three works he picked for his personal room at the First Rome Quadriennale in 1931. The Piedmontese painter, who was in his fifties at the time, had been a permanent fixture among the masters of Italian painting since the 1920s. Appointed as a professor at the Accademia di Firenze in 1924, two years later he held his second solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which followed on from his debut in 1912. In 1929, his large painting La scuola (The School) won first prize at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, previously awarded to Henri Matisse and André Derain. During the same Quadriennale, Carena was also a member of the jury elected by the organising committee chaired by Oppo, as well as being invited to exhibit his works in his own personal room, along with the likes of other leading artists such as Carlo Carrà, Mario Sironi, Ardengo Soffici and Felice Casorati. 

In 1931, critics observed the stylistic differences that could be read in his recent works, revealing a painter at the height of his expressive research. Carena, who had worked when he was still convalescing from a tricky lung abscess operation in 1929, confessed in the catalogue that he wanted to give “the viewer the sense of how I battle desperately to free myself from frameworks that have already been used and seek more direct inspiration from life. My work is fragmentary and as yet uncertain, but necessary to discover the most genuine and essential qualities of my soul.”¹ The neo-17th-century classicism, in the style of Courbet, with which he formulated his large compositions of the 1920s was replaced by new chromatic matter that, in his portraits, reveals his reflection on the works of Amedeo Modigliani who had recently come back to the attention of Italian painters. A very young Rodolfo Pallucchini indicated the Venetian nature of this turnaround: “Felice Carena experiences reality ‘sub forma coloris’, through an amorous sense of his lyrical inspiration […] A Venetian synthesis, interpreted in an impressionistic manner as colour and light, and implemented with a broad and sensuous brushstroke, is now his pictorial ‘ubi consistam’, which is not always immune to stylistic emblems.”² The Natura morta con anguria (Still Life with Watermelon) shows how colouring in the style of Delacroix could be filtered through the contemporary example set by Filippo de Pisis, which is surprising in a painter such as Carena who was from the previous generation, but clear to see in his formula that combines still life with marine life. 

“…blue and pink shells, and large watermelons in bright green and beautiful scarlet, standing out like a cry of summer joy, against the turquoise line of the sea in the background”³:this description, which undoubtedly refers to the work in the Cerruti Collection, was written by Margherita Sarfatti, who purchased the painting directly from the artist in 1931. Until that date, the journalist and art critic, who admired Benito Mussolini and was an official spokesperson for his regime, had invited the Piedmontese painter to the Milanese Novecento group exhibitions that she organised without ever showing a particular appreciation for him. Her purchase marked the inclusion of Carena’s work in an important collection, which also incorporated pieces by Derain, Umberto Boccioni, Carrà and many artists who she supported personally. Oppo’s Quadriennali and the shift of the national artistic axis from Milan to Rome, as well as her loss of favour with Il Duce, led to Sarfatti gradually losing her influence in the Italian art world. Cerruti purchased the work at auction in Turin in 2000, perhaps after having learnt more about Carena at the first monographic exhibition on the painter at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in 1996, where this painting was exhibited for the first time. 

Filippo Bosco 

¹ Turin 1996b, p. 261. 

² Pallucchini 1931, p. 199. 

³ Sarfatti 1931b, p. 497.