“[...]gingham apron, the lowered eyes, the awkward gaze, the hands that don’t know what to do with themselves.”

Ragazza col vestito a quadretti (Girl with a Gingham Dress) was the first work by Felice Casorati to enter the collection of Francesco Federico Cerruti, forming the start of a group that would go on to include the paintings Scherzo: uova (Scherzo: Eggs) of 1914 (cat. p. 712), Mattina (Morning) of 1919-20 (cat. p. 714) and Bambino nello studio (Boy in the Studio) of 1936 (cat. p. 716). Cerruti purchased it at the Galleria La Bussola in Turin on 1 March 1968 together with the Still Life by Giorgio Morandi dated 1958 (cat. p. 832). The dates, both recorded in the internal register, provide information about the times and places involved in the creation of this modern art collection, formed in part thanks to Cerruti’s visit to a gallery with an established tradition and reputation. Having opened in February 1946 with the Mostra del Collezionista, La Bussola had ties with Felice Casorati ever since this inaugural collective exhibition. After featuring in Opere Scelte in April 1949, alongside the likes of Campigli, Carrà, de Chirico, Morandi and Sironi, the artist went on to stage a cycle of solo exhibitions held on a regular basis from 1952 onwards. After his death in 1963, the “Archivio delle Opere Autentiche di Felice Casorati” was established in the premises at Via Po 9 in Turin. It was here that Luigi Carluccio would complete the collection and organise the materials destined for publication in the lengthy monograph of 1964, in which Ragazza col vestito a quadretti is illustrated in the catalogue section. 

Dated by Carluccio to 1942, it seems more likely that Ragazza col vestito a quadretti was actually painted in the 1930s. The work is a so-called “dry oil” piece, a drawing marked out with a brush in “ivory black” on paper.¹ Introduced by the painter towards the mid-1920s and used for around fifteen years, this technique was almost entirely absent by the 1940s. Dry oil art is an unusual hybrid of drawing and painting, generating an independent artwork that stands out from preparatory studies. In an article written in 1932, the scholar and art critic Guido Lodovico Luzzatto recognised the “monochrome” of these sheets as displaying the tenor of a creation that was “so accomplished and firm, that it suggested a greyscale painting rather than a drawing.”² The “clarity of the outer shell”, he observes, is created by the sensitive and versatile brushstrokes, carefully dosed in an alternation of “soft and solid hues” and “patches of dark shade” as in this case.³ 

The face of the Girl belongs to the family of girls with “shadowed sloping noses”, “protruding eyebrow arches” and “convex foreheads”, images that Luigi Carluccio would associate with the “unattractive” sphere, an iconographic and sentimental stylistic feature that Casorati often accompanied with a series of notations such as the “gingham apron, the lowered eyes, the awkward gaze, the hands that don’t know what to do with themselves.”⁴ The facial features of the girl, perched on the dormeuse (one of the pieces of furniture in the painter’s home-studio), are directly comparable to those of Giuseppina, Tre sorelle (Three Sisters) (fig. 1) and Ragazze a Nervi (Girls in Nervi), from 1930,⁵ and one of their descendants: La convalescente (Ragazza seduta) (The Convalescent [Seated Girl]) of 1934, now in the collections at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice,⁶ which is a possible model for dating this work (fig. 2). 

The inclusion of this piece in Casorati’s solo exhibition, curated by Luigi Cavallo and Marco Valsecchi at the Galleria Il Castello in Milan, in May 1970, provides a valuable indication of Cerruti’s history as a lender, having entered into the group of collectors of the artist known to the exhibition system within a year of his purchase. 

Giorgina Bertolino 

¹ This information is taken from a statement written by his widow Daphne Maugham, on the back of a photograph with a Figure of a Woman from 1927-30. The undated statement, which was written after 1963, is kept at the Archivio Casorati in Turin.

² Luzzatto 1932, p. 54. Illustrated by a dry oil drawing entitled Anna, the article analyses the work of Casorati, after an introduction on the drawings of Matisse, Picasso and Modigliani.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Carluccio 1964, pp. 146, 148.

⁵ Bertolino, Poli 1995, respectively, pp. 320-321, no.

⁴16, ill.; pp. 321-322, no. 417, pl. XXXI, ill.; pp. 322-323, no. 418, pl. XXXII, ill.

⁶ Bertolino, Poli 1995, p. 350, no. 538, ill.