Franco Angeli

Franco Angeli
Born	14 March 1935
Died	12 November 1988

Giuseppe Franco Angeli (14 May 1935 – 12 November 1988) was an Italian sculptor and painter.

Early life

The son of Erminia Angeli and Gennaro Gennarini, Giuseppe Franco Angeli was born in Via dei Piceni in the San Lorenzo district of Rome on 14 May 1935. Like his brothers Omero and Othello, he took his mother’s surname. After his father’s death, when he was only nine years old, Angeli began working as a storeroom boy. He also worked in a car body repair shop and for an upholsterer. He would later use fabrics, templates and scraps of cloth from his upholstery role for his paintings.

Art

Angeli, who had never taken formal art classes, began painting in 1957 when stationed in Orvieto on military service. He took up painting, because, as he explained later, “When you feel a deep malaise, you must look for a way not to be lonely. In short, you need to end an interest that will accompany you in life.”

Angeli was later stationed in Rome, where he met sculptor Edgardo Mannucci, a friend of Alberto Burri. Angeli was fascinated by Burri’s work and was even to borrow the worn-out materiality of the Catrami (Tars). Significantly, on the subject of one of his own paintings, E da una ferita scaturì la bellezza (Out of a Wound, Beauty Pours Forth; 1957), a work based on the memory of the bombing of San Lorenzo on 19 July 1943, he was to write: “Matter for me is a fragment of this huge wound that devastated Europe; my first paintings were like that, like a wound from which I removed pieces of bandage.” His initial approaches to painting were also marked by his membership of the Italian Communist Party, which he later departed, drawing closer to the more radical left and Maoist movements. In March 1959, in a joint exhibition with Tano Festa and Giuseppe Uncini, he showed his works for the first time in the Galleria La Salita. He was featured together with Agostino Bonalumi, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg and Mimmo Rotella in the magazine Azimuth, founded by Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani. In January 1960, he was given his first solo show by the Galleria La Salita. His featured works were characterised by veils of oil paints and nylon stockings, stretched tight and covered with gauzes. The effect of evoking memories and absences was described by Cesare Vivaldi as the “tears of things”. In 1960, he also took part in a collective show, again at the Galleria La Salita, curated by Pierre Restany and entitled 5 pittori. Roma 60 (5 Painters. Rome 60): Angeli, Festa, Lo Savio, Schifano, Uncini.

In 1962, he took part in “New Perspectives of Italian Painting”, a collective exhibition at the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna. Angeli showed a series of works with the first symbols of power - initially swastikas, crosses and half-moons. One example is the series entitled Cimiteri (Cemeteries) from the early 1960s: the sequences of white crosses recall the power of Mauri’s Schermi (Screens) and the Achrome (Achromes) by Manzoni, with whom he was in close contact. Angeli portrayed fragments of history and recorded traces of contemporary events, creating works such as O.A.S. (1961), alluding to the illegal paramilitary French organisation during the Algerian war; Cuba (1960), inspired by the United States embargo shortly after Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces had overthrown Batista’s dictatorship, and 25 luglio (25 July), commemorates the fall of the Fascist regime in 1943.

In February 1963, he showed some works along with a poem by Nanni Balestrini in a collective exhibition of “13 painters” (13 pittori a Roma), in the Galleria La Tartaruga. In May the same year, he was at the Galerie J in Paris, together with Christo, Conner, Kudo, Todd and Mauri in an exhibition curated by Restany - L’Object Pressenti. Shortly afterwards, in June, he held a solo show at the Galleria La Tartaruga with a series of works in which the value of the symbol acquires a different dimension, as he went beyond the legacy of Arte informale. In 1963, he also collaborated with Mario Diacono and Elio Pagliarani on the production of limited editions of books with handwritten texts and original drawings. For a solo show at the Galleria dell’Ariete, Milan in January 1964, Angeli resorted to stereotype ideological urban symbols, emblematic of the rhetorical, celebratory character of the archaeological ends in Rome. These works became the “Capitoline Fragments”, which he presented in a Roman exhibition in October 1964 at the Studio d’arte Arco d’Alibert, while in March he took part in a collective show with Umberto Bignardi, Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, Jannis Kounellis, Sergio Lombardo, Renato Mambor and Cesare Tacchi at the Galleria La Tartaruga. In June, he showed his work for the first time at the Venice Biennale (32nd Inter- national Art Exhibition). In the two selected works, La Lupa (She-Wolf) and Quarter Dollar, his use of the veil obscures the significance of the underlying symbol, pushing it into the recesses of memory.

In April 1965, he was one of the prominent artists of “A Generation”, an exhibition at the Galleria Odyssia, Rome, while in autumn he had two simultaneous solo shows – at the Galerie J, Paris, and the Gal- leria Zero, Verona – and was also present at the 10th National Art Quadrennial in Rome and in L’art actuel en Italie: semaines italiennes at the Municipal Casino, Cannes. He produced a series of dazibaos: Compagni, Berlino 1945 (Comrades, Berlin, 1945), Compagno vietnamita (Vietnamese Comrade), Occupazione di un monumento equestre (Occupation of an Equestrian Monument) and Abbraccio eterno (Eternal Embrace). These works caused Dario Micacchi to describe Angeli’s approach to painting as “seeing and making reality be seen politically”.

Angeli's 1966 solo show Half Dollar at the Studio d’arte Arco d’Alibert exemplified his views on coins, which he saw as "the ‘small symbolic world’ that he had been seeking for years and previously thought he had found in ags, coats of arms and stone inscriptions.” In October, the exhibition America America (Half Dollar) opened at the Galleria dell’Ariete with veiled gilded eagles in hues of blue, white and red. The same title was used for a solo show at the Studio d’arte Arco d’Alibert in March 1967 - in April of that year, he took part in the collective show of eight Roman painters at the Galleria De Foscherari, Bologna, and in June he was one of “Eleven Italian Art- ists from the1960s” in an exhibition at the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, where he met Marina Ripa di Meana, with whom he would have a love affair to inspire gossip columns for a long time to come.

In September, he took part in the 9th São Paulo Art Biennial and made his first film, Giornate di lettura (Reading Days), followed by a long period in which he combined video, photography and the visual arts, as evidenced by films such as Schermi (Screens; 1968), New York (1969), Viva il Primo Maggio (Hurrah for the First of May; 1968), and Souvenir (1984).

In 1966, Sandro Franchina shot a film entitled Morire gratis (Die for Free), telling the story of how Angeli’s sculpture the Lupa capitolina (Capitoline She-Wolf) was taken by car from Rome to Paris. In March 1968, in a solo exhibition at the Galleria La Tartaruga, Angeli showed a series of works with metal inserts, grids, arrows and three-dimensional panels that prefigured the lowered ceiling of the installation Opprimente (Oppressive) created for “The Theatre of Exhibitions” at the Galleria La Tartaruga, a landmark event involving a host of artists such as Fioroni, Emilio Prini and Paolo Icaro, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Castellani, Paolo Scheggi, Mario Ceroli, Mambor, Tacchi, Alighiero Boetti and Mauri.

In 1968, Angeli was preoccupied with the Vietnam war and the student protests, as he produced works such as Università Americana (American University; 1967) and Corteo (Protest March; 1968), created using the technique of social reportage.

In January 1969, he made his first trip to the United States, ahead of the collective exhibition entitled Italian Art Show: Franco Angeli, Cesare Tacchi, Tano Festa and Lorri Whiting, installed in the Contemporary Arts Gallery, Loeb Student Center, New York in October and November. Meantime in Italy there were another two exhibitions: a solo show at the Galleria dell’Ariete in January and a collective show Anno ’60 (The Year 1960) at the Galleria Christian Stein in April.

In the early 1970s Angeli continued to focus on real political events as he produced a series of landscapes, such as Dagli Appenini alle Ande (From the Apennines to the Andes) and Canto popolare delle Ande (Andean Folk Song), a geometrically inspired work dedicated to the coup in Chile of 11 September 1973. He returned to the Vietnam war in Anonimo euroasiatico (Anonymous Eurasian; 1969) and Compagni (Giap e Ho Chi Minh) (Comrades [Giap and Ho Chi Minh]; 1971), while he also addressed the military coup in Greece.

In 1975, he met Livia Lancellotti, his life partner, with whom he had a daughter, Maria, in 1976. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, some “childishly joyful toy airplanes, bearing death in Vietnam,” began to appear in his landscapes and seemed also to recall the bombings of the Second World War.

Later life

Angeli’s deep interest in social and popularculture issues continued in his works of the 1980s, when he returned to the theme of war in a series of exotic landscapes with pyramids, obelisks and airplanes that eventually became Esplosioni (Explosions; 1986). The stylized forms have spires, capitals and deserted squares as if in “a grandiose, excruciating sense of excavation in which history and life resurface as perfect, intact geometric solids radiating fresh, fragrant pure colours – green, blue and red.” The theme of “puppets”, which he developed from 1984, became a kind of self-portrait that seems to foreshadow the last stage of his life. Franco Angeli died in Rome on 12 November 1988.