Salvatore Fiume - Black Madonna

Born in Comiso, Sicily, on October 23, 1915, Salvatore Fiume was a painter, sculptor, architect, writer, and set designer. At sixteen, he won a scholarship to the Royal Institute for Book Illustration in Urbino, where he acquired a profound knowledge of printing techniques: lithography, silkscreen, etching, and xylography. In 1936, after completing his studies, he went to Milan, where he met artists and intellectuals, including Dino Buzzati and Salvatore Quasimodo (winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature), with whom he became friends. In 1938, he moved to Ivrea to work for Olivetti , as art director of a cultural magazine particularly dear to the president, Adriano Olivetti, which featured prestigious intellectuals such as Franco Fortini and Leonardo Sinisgalli. Although he intended to establish himself as a painter, Fiume achieved his first success with a literary work, the autobiographical novel Viva Gioconda!, published in 1943 by Bianchi-Giovini of Milan. To devote himself fully to painting, he left Olivetti in 1946 and settled in Canzo, near Como, where he adapted a huge 19th-century spinning mill into a studio, which became his permanent residence in 1952 (it is now the headquarters of the Salvatore Fiume Foundation ). In 1948, as his painting, strongly influenced by the Italian Quattrocento and the metaphysical painting of de Chirico, Savinio, and Carrà, struggled to gain recognition, he painted and successfully exhibited a series of paintings inspired by Spanish tradition and folklore at the Galleria Gussoni in Milan, signing them Francisco Queyo , a non-existent gypsy painter whose story he invented as a politically persecuted exile in Paris. 1949 was the year of his first official exhibition, again in Milan, at the Galleria Borromini, where his Islands of Statues and Cities of Statues attracted much critical interest. During the Borromini exhibition, Alfred H. Barr Jr., director of the MoMA Collections in New York, purchased City of Statues (1947), now at MoMA , while the Jucker Collection in Milan acquired a painting exhibited at that same exhibition. In 1950, Alberto Savinio, Giorgio de Chirico's brother, encouraged his participation in the Venice Biennale, where he exhibited the triptych Island of Statues (now in the Vatican Museums), which earned him a full-page spread in the American magazine "Life." Fiume's first experience in scenography dates back to 1952, again at the suggestion of Alberto Savinio. In that year he created the sketches for the sets and costumes for De Falla's La vita breve and Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus at the Teatro alla Scala . This was followed by Cherubini's Medea (1953), Respighi's La Fiamma (1954), Bellini's Norma (1955), Verdi's Nabucco (1958) and Rossini's William Tell (1965). He then collaborated with other important theatres, such as Covent Garden in London (Verdi's Aida, 1957), the Rome Opera House (Medea, 1954), the Teatro Massimo in Palermo (Bellini's I Capuleti ei Montecchi, 1954) and the Monte Carlo Opera House (Donizetti's Il Campanello, 1992), with which he concluded his collaboration with the opera house. In 1951, the illustrious architect Gio Ponti commissioned a huge painting (3 meters x 48 meters) for the first-class lounge of the Andrea Doria ocean liner . Fiume depicted an imaginary Italian Renaissance city filled with masterpieces from various historical periods, so that travelers could get an idea of ​​the masterpieces they would admire in our country. Unfortunately, in 1956, the immense canvas was lost when the ship sank off the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts. In 1953, “Life” and “Time” magazines commissioned him to create a series of works for their New York offices depicting an imaginary history of Manhattan and New York Bay, which Fiume reinvented as Islands of Statues . Between 1949 and 1952, at the invitation of industrialist Bruno Buitoni Sr., Fiume completed a cycle of ten large paintings on the theme of the "Adventures, Misfortunes, and Glories" of ancient Umbria, in which the influence of fifteenth-century Italian masters such as Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello is evident. The paintings, donated by the Buitoni family to the Umbria Region in 1988, are housed in the Sala Fiume of Palazzo Donini in Perugia, open to the public. In 1962, a traveling exhibition brought one hundred of Fiume's paintings to various German museums, including the cities of Cologne and Regensburg. In 1967, he executed the sketch for the large mosaic in the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth , Holy Land. In 1973, accompanied by his photographer friend Walter Mori, Fiume traveled to Ethiopia, to the Babile Valley , where he painted his Islands on a group of rocks using marine paints. For the major 1974 retrospective exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, Fiume created a life-size polystyrene reproduction of some of the rocks painted in Ethiopia, filling almost the entirety of the enormous Hall of the Caryatids. On the same occasion, he presented for the first time the African Mona Lisa, now in the Vatican Museums, a tribute to African female beauty inspired by Leonardo's Mona Lisa. In 1975, the Calabrian town of Fiumefreddo Bruzio enthusiastically welcomed Fiume's proposal to revitalize its historic center free of charge with some of his works. Thus, in 1975-76, he painted some of the interior and exterior walls of the ancient castle and, in 1976, the dome of the Chapel of San Rocco. His first exhibition as a sculptor was in 1976 at the Galleria l'Isola in Milan. His production also includes large-scale works, such as the bronze statue at the European Parliament in Strasbourg , the sculptures for the San Raffaele hospitals in Milan and Rome, the bronze group for the Fontana del Vino in Marsala, and two bronzes at the Museo del Parco in Portofino . In 1995, the Centro Allende in La Spezia hosted his last sculpture exhibition in its open-air spaces. In 1985, he held a major painting exhibition at Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. In 1987, the exhibition De Architectura Pingendi at the Sporting d'Hiver in Monte Carlo was inaugurated by Prince Rainier of Monaco. In 1991, he exhibited his architectural projects at the International Architecture Exhibition in Milan, at the Palazzo della Triennale , and in 1992, he exhibited his paintings at Villa Medici , home of the French Academy in Rome. In 1993, Fiume visited Gauguin's Polynesian homelands and, in homage to the great French master, donated a painting to the Gauguin Museum in Papeari, Tahiti. In addition to his critically acclaimed novel Viva Gioconda!, Fiume published numerous short stories, nine comedies, a tragedy, and two collections of poetry. In 1988, the University of Palermo awarded him an honorary degree in Modern Literature. His works are found in some of the world's most important museums, including the Vatican Museums, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the MoMA in New York, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan. Since 1978, the Vatican Museums have housed a collection of 33 works, which encompasses many of the main themes of his work. Fiume died in Milan on 3 June 1997. Among the exhibitions of Salvatore Fiume's work held since 1997, noteworthy are the one at the Artesanterasmo Gallery in Milan entitled Le Alleanze pittoriche in 1997, the anthological exhibition in the castle of Gualtieri, Reggio Emilia, in 1998, the portrait exhibition Il Corpo e l'anima in 1999, also at the Artesanterasmo in Milan, the one in 2001 in the municipality of Canzo, where Fiume lived from 1946, entitled Salvatore Fiume: Miti Ipotesi Metafore, the two exhibitions in 2006, in Vilnius, and in Warsaw at the respective Italian Cultural Institutes. In 2007-2008, there was a major retrospective (207 works) at the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Arezzo , for the tenth anniversary of his death, and in 2008, the one entitled Myth and classicism on the threshold of metaphysics, at the Auditorium-Parco della Musica in Rome. From December 2010 to February 2011, the Spazio Oberdan in Milan hosted the exhibition Salvatore Fiume: a Nonconformist of the Twentieth Century (100 works, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures). The exhibition The Identities of Salvatore Fiume, 50 Works from the 1940s to the 1990s was held at Palazzo Pirelli in Milan in October 2012. The municipality of Varese purchased one of his sculptures, which was installed in Piazza del Tribunale in 2012. Between 2012 and 2013, Salvatore Fiume's children donated eleven large-scale works to the Lombardy Region, which houses them in the Spazio Fiume within the new Palazzo Lombardia in Milan. Furthermore, one of his sculptures was installed in Milan's Piazza Piemonte on October 23, 2013, the day Fiume would have turned 98.

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