Felice Casorati (Novara 1886 - Turin 1963)

Felice Casorati (Novara 1886 – Turin 1963) took up painting in 1902 and by 1907 had already shown a work at the Venice Biennale. After spending some time in in Naples and Verona, Casorati moved to Turin following the First World War and soon became a leading figure in that city’s artistic and cultural life.
His training reflects a revival of Symbolist influences, from Puvis de Chavannes to the British Pre-Raphaelites to the Jugenstil of late-19th-century Austria and Germany, a cultural tradition whose hallmark is its insistence on the linearity of drawing that could be said to enclose the image.
After 1919 Casorati grafted the elements of his training onto the lesson of the Metaphysical school and elaborated a painterly language in which the mysterious or unsettled immobility of the forms transmits a cold mental severity.
The typical central European theme of melancholy was long the dominant note in Casorati’s expressive quest. It dissipated in the early 1930s, giving way to a more easily moved sensibility.