“In the series of saints and hermits […] Spazzapan is influenced by the Byzantine or primitive (à la Rufino Tamayo) abstraction of the icon. [...]”

“Between avant-garde and tradition, drawing and colour, painting and illustration, figurative and nonfigurative, between success and rejection.”¹ The contradictions formulated by a critic (and artist) as perceptive as Albino Galvano in an essay of 1960 clearly exemplify the difficulty of locating Luigi Spazzapan’s work within the broader panorama of Italian painting. In this perspective, due to the variety of pictorial languages and figurative approaches adopted and developed through continual opposition, he constitutes an anomaly that is certainly anything but predictable, “an antinomy,” as Galvano wrote, “that is an essential chapter of the history of art in Turin and elsewhere of this post-war period”.² 

Having moved from Gradisca d’Isonzo, where he was involved in the local Futurist circles, to Turin in 1928, Spazzapan immediately found himself part of a lively scene animated at the time by the group of six artists known as the Sei di Torino and their champions Edoardo Persico and Lionello Venturi, with whom he forged close professional and intellectual bonds. Endowed with a particular talent for draughtsmanship, he found work as an illustrator with the Gazzetta del Popolo newspaper and painted all through the 1930s in the Post-Impressionist style without, however, fully sharing its naturalism, preferring a freer and more personal figurative synthesis based above all on memory.³ His presence in the city became still more marked after World War II, not only as a point of reference for the younger generations (almost representing, with his eccentric temperament, a heterodox alternative to the icy figure of Felice Casorati) but also as a cultural organiser. In 1947, together with a group of artists and writers (including the sculptor Umberto Mastroianni, the painter Mattia Moreni and the architect Ettore Sottsass Jr), Spazzapan organised the Premio Torino or Turin Prize with a view to increasing awareness of the most advanced trends in Italian art. The interest that Spazzapan developed in religious motifs in the late 1940s took shape in series of works on figures and scenes - including saints, hermits, evangelists and crucifixes - drawn directly from the sacral sphere in a brisk and markedly anti-naturalistic style with daring chromatic choices midway between figuration and abstraction. Very often regarded as a fleeting and somewhat unsuccessful phase in his career looking forward to the liberation of abstract form in the 1950s,⁴ the Santoni series of saints (including the Cerruti Piccolo evangelista) found more perceptive interpretation in the late 1980s, focusing above all on its symbolism and archaic roots. As Maurizio Calvesi wrote in 1989: 

“In the series of saints and hermits […] Spazzapan is influenced by the Byzantine or primitive (à la Rufino Tamayo) abstraction of the icon. The hair around the round faces of the saints and the halo around the face of Christ repeat the magnetic motif of the sun, which appears sometimes in the background […]. He thus produces a mandala-like image in which, however, the radiating fixity of the mandala is infused with a tragic expressionistic tension of hectic or barbed lines.”⁵ 

Most probably presented at the Galleria del Grifo as early as 1952 in an exhibition of religious art, a genre that saw a revival of general interest in that period,⁶ Piccolo evangelista (Small Evangelist) appeared in the major retrospectives held a few years after the painter’s death. In addition to the important exhibitions in Ivrea and Turin in 1960, this work appeared in a major exhibition at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin in 1963, being catalogued on that occasion as part of the personal collection of the gallery owner Mario Tazzoli. 

Alessandro Botta 

¹ Galvano 1960, p. 60.

² Ibid., p. 61.

³ As Spazzapan told his friend Velso Mucci: “I screw up if I look at things while painting because I run stupidly after the object and lose sight of the work. And I’m not really an Impressionist at all. I realise now that I have to proceed as I do for the drawings, using memory alone and emptying my object, what had formed inside me, out onto the paper” (Mucci 1963, p. 6).

⁴ Lionello Venturi wrote as follows about this period in 1960: “Around 1950, Spazzapan was attracted by religious scenes, which helped to suggest mysterious, transcendental motifs. […] He commenced the series of Santoni, varying greatly in quality, some created seriously, some satirically and some playfully but all in order to endow abstract forms with imaginative content and vital dynamism. […] Some of these paintings of saints are good but the path leading to them was wrong. The contrast between abstraction and violent realism remained almost insuperable and intense colour was not enough to bridge the gap. Spazzapan was aware of this. His pursuit of the pictorial and longing for geometrical form could not reach fulfilment through their juxtaposition but required something new and never seen before” (Venturi l. 1960, p. 74). 

⁵ M. Calvesi, “Spazzapan incendiario”, in Gradisca-Turin 1989, p. 13.

⁶ A label on the back of the painting attests to a period at the Galleria del Grifo in Turin. In particular, Piccolo evangelista may have appeared in the exhibition of February 1952 of work by Turinese artists shown four months earlier in the 1951 Novara Biennial of Religious Art (Opere di artisti torinesi alla IIa Biennale d’arte sacra di Novara). Spazzapan took part in the biennial in 1951 and in 1954.