Perspectives - Corrado Cagli: Mutations: Curated by Alberto Mazzacchera

Corrado Cagli: Mutations is the first in a tightly focused series titled “Perspectives”, the aim of which is to take a close look at some of the themes and techniques that characterised, for a certain period, the production of artists that have already been represented by Brun Fine Art in the past.

The artist’s deep-rooted embrace of the idea of freedom sometimes brought him into conflict with art critics. On the other hand, his path as an “analytic, research-oriented painter, […] everything concentrated on in-depth investigation” meant that he was fully justified in stating that he had no interest in becoming an “entomologist's butterfly”. After World War II, his omnivorous curiosity, free from conditioning and facile frameworks, led him to embark upon one series of paintings after another: once he finished fully exploring and digging through one, he moved onto to another; each one new but always recognisably Cagli.

Nevertheless, there is a deep break that splits his activity into two fundamental periods, the dividing line between which was determined by historical events to which Cagli responded with remarkable courage.

While Cagli’s works in the 1937 Paris Expo were disliked by the fascist regime and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Galeazzo Ciano, stigmatised the artist with the heavy accusation of “defeatism”, in 1938, the attacks by regime journalists became head-on and vulgar. Indeed, the prestigious Galleria della Cometa, opened in Rome in 1935 and in New York in 1937 by the countess Maria Laetitia Pecci Blunt, was framed as having been skilfully manipulated by the Jewish Cagli and, as such, a promoter of “degenerate, internationalist, cosmopolitan, decadent art”. The increasingly pressing attacks were focused on his Jewishness, but they might very well have degenerated into attacks on his sexuality, if Cagli had not decided to promptly quit Italy, heading first to Paris and then, in October 1939, the United States.

Far from living in gilded exile, in 1941, after becoming an American citizen, the artist enlisted as a volunteer in the American 188th Field Artillery Group. He thus returned to Europe in 1944, remaining until the end of the war. Cagli was profoundly changed by his experience of the war, which took him from the front in Normandy to Ardenne, the liberation of Paris and that of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1945, after a difficult period concentrated on the ideals of freedom, the artist was once again in New York: this time not as an exile, as in 1939, but as a true liberator.

His return to New York, where he opened a studio in the Upper East Side, was packed with prestigious projects and he satisfied his need for research through his successful work for the theatre. His talent for creating large murals with astonishing speed, demonstrated time and time again in Italy, was now channelled into the creation of stage sets, activity that he paired with costume design.

He worked intensely for the choreographer George Balanchine and the composers Gian Carlo Menotti, Vittorio Rieti and Igor Stravinsky. And also for Maria Piscator’s The Poet’s Theatre and the sets and costumes for Paul Goodman’s The Dusk and Two plays. His exhibitions multiplied, from New York and Chicago to Santa Barbara and San Francisco.

Cagli’s American period was rich in stimuli and profitable, sustained discussion with two important mathematicians: Oscar Zariski and Abraham Seidenberg (who were, for that matter, also Cagli’s brothers-in-law, having married his two sisters Jole and Ebe). Whereas Zariski studied projective geometry on three-dimensional Euclidean space, the younger Seidenberg extended his research to projective spaces in n dimensions.

The poet Charles Olson (1910–1970), who Cagli met in 1939 at the Guggenheim Foundation, played an important role in the development of his work. This was during a time when Cagli was studying Jung’s psychoanalytic theories, using them to probe the deepest layers of the human psyche. Olson and Cagli both produced paintings, drawings and poems on the theme of tarot: activity that constituted a kind of point of fusion for their shared research on the archetype and, from there, exploration of non-Euclidean geometry and the fourth dimension. Cagli was impressed by the spectacular three-dimensional models in the fourth dimension of the mathematician Paul Samuel Donchian, who he met through Zariski.

For both Cagli and Olson, the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry demonstrated that the merely monological system did not offer a possibility for embracing reality, comprehension of which instead required being open to a multiplicity of theories.

During his feverish New York period, Cagli, as Crispolti acutely observed, achieved true “expressive liberation of the mark”, which now, alongside the artist’s rock-solid command, took on potency to more forcefully express the deepest layers of consciousness.

In 1952, he started designing sets and costumes for numerous operas and ballets, in particular for Maggio Musicale in Florence, the Rome Opera, the Teatro Olimpico in Rome, La Scala in Milan and the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. Theatre, and to a lesser degree cinema, working with John Houston, allowed him to continue his experimentation and satisfy his need for three-dimensionality.

 While the representational artist Renato Guttuso (1911–1987) took it upon himself during the 1954 Venice Biennale to defend the presence of Cagli’s abstract paintings alongside his own, ten years later, the 32nd Biennale cemented Cagli’s arrival, giving him a solo room.

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