(Rome 1900–1972)
Superficie 038, 1949–50, oil on canvas, 38.5 x 61 cm, framed

Photo certificate:
Fondazione Archivio Capogrossi, signed by Guglielmo Capogrossi, Rome, 11 February 2009

Provenance:
Galleria del Secolo, Rome (stamp on the reverse)
Prof. Ferrazza, Director of Musei Vaticani, Rome
Galleria L’Isola, Rome (label on the reverse and certificate available)
Frea Arte, Milan, 8 March 1994, lot 158
Tornabuoni Arte, Florence
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Rome, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Galleria Il Secolo, January 1950

Literature:
Maestri Contemporanei. Antologia scelta 1996, curated by Tornabuoni Arte Contemporanea, Florence, p. 35 with ill.
F. R. Morelli, G. Capogrossi, Giuseppe Capogrossi. Catalogo ragionato, vol. I, 1920–1949, Skira 2012, no. 238 with ill.

In January 1950, the exhibition of Giuseppe Capogrossi’s new works, launched at the Galleria del Secolo in Rome, inadvertently burst onto the art scene, an event emblematic of nascent conflicts in that same environment. From that moment on, it became known as the “Capogrossi case”. The tonal painter, the artist of impalpable elegance of the Roman School, according to the majority of his critics and colleagues, had made a true and unforgivable renunciation. Yet the new sign-based paintings shown at that now famous exhibition are but the fruit of that deep need for change, for freedom, for that “need to start again from scratch in order to no longer be a slave […] a moral need.” […]
How should those new and synthetic apparitions, some of which are rigorously black and white, be interpreted? The paintings exhibited at the Galleria del Secolo are true and proper incunabula, the result of years of analytical development of the sign, of the ideal necessity of a new way of representing and painting the new world, the new exigencies of the contemporary world.
L. M. Barbero, „Giuseppe Capogrossi“ in Capogrossi - Una Retrospettiva, pp. 71-72

“I am convinced that I did not substantially change my painting, but rather clarified it”
Giuseppe Capogrossi