Giuseppe Santomaso

Giuseppe ‘Bepi’ Santomaso was born in 1907 in Venice. He began his training at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation where he exhibited in 1926 when he was only 18 years old, then studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice (1932). 

Giuseppe Santomaso and 20th century Italian figurative and naturalistic painting

 Venice began to feel a little ‘tight’ for him and in 1937 he moved to the Netherlands to study the Impressionists. Then he moved to Paris, visited the great international exhibitions (Matisse, Braque, Picasso). His first solo exhibition was in Paris in 1939.

The early 1940s are characterised by still lives, close to the poetics of Giorgio Morandi.

1946 became the watershed in his painting towards post-Cubist abstraction

In 1946, the artist became one of the maitres-à-pensers of the Fronte nuovo delle arti, the first exhibition in Milan saw him as a protagonist.

He soon set aside social themes to paint abstract tensions and emotional figurations. He exhibited in Stockholm in 1948 together with Afro and Birolli.

For the 26th Biennale in 1952, he joined the Group of Eight, or the Abstract-Concretists (as Lionello Venturi defined them), made up of Corpora, Moreni, Turcato, Vedova, Afro, Birolli, Morlotti and Santomaso himself, painters destined to transform the tradition of figurative painting from within, emphasising the need for abstraction, ‘Reality surrounds us, we are also reality’ (Santomaso).

In 1954, he won the International Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale.

From 1954 to 1974, he taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice for 20 years.

A further evolution – Informal art

In the second half of the 1950s, he broke free from content and form, trespassing into a surrealism à la Miró.

During the 1960s, Santomaso abandoned informal art and developed an image made up of spatial suggestions, emotionality and luminous vibrations whose sublimation reached its peak in works such as Homage to Cimabue’s Crucifix and Letters to Palladio (1977 series presented at the Guggenheim in 1992).

Santomaso died in Venice on 23 May 1990.