The nude in the middle of the room is the central focus of the canvas, the cornerstone of a pictorial device developed by Felice Casorati to discuss painting itself. In Bambino nello studio (Boy in the Studio) the artist returns to the theme of the workshop, the closed, ideal and self- reflective world introduced in the early years of his Turin period, which went on to become one of the constant features of his style as a whole. 

In this work from 1936, the continuity of the subject is confirmed by the inclusion, on the right-hand side, of a canvas on an easel, a literal citation of Maria Anna De Lisi, the 1919 tempera that marked the start of his series of studies (fig. 1).1 In both cases, the artist places the canvas in the margin and chooses to show a small strip of the back, consigning the front to the sphere of the invisible and of hypothesis. An emblem of his trade, the canvas is both a mirror and a potential screen: placed opposite the nude but hidden away on the edge, it tells us about the complex relations between model and figure, reality and representation. A key motif of the painting as a whole, this relationship is interpreted and multiplied through the series of canvases (at least seven) that make up the polyhedron around the boy.

The studio is a cordoned off space, amplified by the glimpse of the shadow and the lines of the floor on the left that draw our gaze towards a dark background. Within this environment with its fleeting perimeter, Casorati has created a stable yet temporary architecture, using the canvases like scenery flats. The alternation between those painted or as yet untouched surfaces evokes the times and phases of the practice of painting, from the gesso preparation of the support to the application of the ochre wash, all the way through to tracing out the shapes, one outlined against a dark background, like a blackboard, the others against expanses of white that fades into hues of grey and blue. 

Through the painting within the painting, the artist exhibits a compendium of sources and styles, using contrast to highlight the nude boy, his anatomy painted with impeccable classical purity, his delicate long limbs, his pale flesh and his dusky face with its marked features that echo Picasso’s primitivist physiognomies. His body rises up like a sculpture from a sheet/rug that acts as a pedestal, and is overlooked and watched by two imposing female nudes barely sketched out on the large canvas in the background. With his lowered gaze, one hand on his chest and the other hanging by his side, the Boy is an image of melancholy, a member of that ideal family of solitary and introverted figures often captured by Casorati in this period under the title Ammalata (Unwell), interpreting the existential condition with eloquent gestures that evoke mournfulness, withdrawal and thoughtfulness. On the other hand, the reciprocity between the nude, the drawing and the monochrome testify to the dialogue that the painter established between figuration and abstraction in the mid-1930s, a comparison he sought in painting and also endorsed in the field of cultural promotion, as demonstrated by the opening of I Mostra collectiva degli Artisti Astratti Italiani exhibition in Turin in March 1935, “held in the studio of the painters Felice Casorati and Enrico Paolucci [sic]”.2

During the 25 opere di Felice Casorati exhibition, which opened in the city in January 1937, the critic and journalist Marziano Bernardo, who organized the monographic show, coined an expression to describe that style: “figurative abstraction” (fig. 2).3 The exhibition, held in the reception hall of La Stampa newspaper, was the first time the Boy in the Studio was exhibited. Recently completed, it was included in a genealogy that the artist started in the 1920s, with Uova sulla tavola (Eggs on the Table) and La donna e l’armatura (The Woman and the Armour), continued with Venere bionda (Blonde Venus) in 1933.4 The painting was accented here by two striking juxtapositions: the first with The Studio, a recent reworking of the painting of the same name from 1923, which was lost in 1931 in the fire at the Glastplast in Munich;5 the second with Icaro (Icarus), now in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in which a male nude is shown lying down, a collapsed sleeping figure in the landscape (fig. 3).6 

Bambino and Icaro, together with Ammalata, Anna and Marilena,7 formed a cycle of vulnerability on the walls of the solo exhibition in Turin, a form of encoded and silent resistance that employs an iconography of weakness to oppose the rhetoric of prowess, health and strength advocated by the Fascist regime at the time. “Beneath the seeming coldness of Casorati’s art,” noted Bernardi in the catalogue, “emerges an absorbed and magical world, more inclined to reserve and defence than towards immediate communicability.”8 The mass public’s reception was described in the newspapers at the time, particularly in La Nazione, where Bernardi, disheartened by the “case of Casorati”, who was still misunderstood in 1937 and what is more “in a large modern city like Turin”,9 was answered by Alberto Savinio in the same columns, in an article entitled “The Problem with Intelligence”.10 Exhibited at the Galleria di Roma, in 1937 Bambino nello studio entered the collection of the musician and composer Alfredo Casella, who had formerly owned Mattino. Recorded as belonging to the same owner, the work featured at the Venice Biennale both in 1938 and in 1964, as well as in the monographic exhibition with which the Galleria Civica in Turin paid tribute to the painter a year after his death. Like Mattino, Bambino nello studio was purchased by Francesco Federico Cerruti through the Studio Sotis in Rome, which included it in the Casorati. Opere 1914/1959 exhibition, curated by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco in 1983. 

[Giorgina Bertolino]

¹ Bertolino, Poli 1995, no. 131, pp. 215-217. For the dating to 1919 see G. Bertolino, “Come deve essere una sala da esposizione? La funzione di Ca’ Pesaro nella carriera di Felice Casorati”, in Portinari 2018, p. 119. 

² Pittori Astratti Italiani, invitation, Casorati and Paulucci’s Studio, Via Barolo 2, Turin, from 4 March 1935. The exhibition also featured Bogliardi, De Amicis, D’Errico, Fontana, Ghiringhelli, Licini, Melotti, Reggiani, Soldati, Veronesi. 

³ Turin 1937, np. 

⁴ Bertolino, Poli 1995, respectively pp. 230-232, no. 162, pl. XII, ill.; pp. 239-41, no. 176, pl. XIV, ill.; pp. 339-340, no. 501, ill. 

⁵ Considered a fundamental painting by the artist, The Studio of 1923 was destroyed in the fire at the Glastpalast in Munich in summer 1931, during the Münchener Kunstausstellung 1931 im Glaspalast exhibition and was repainted in a new version in 1934. Bertolino, Poli1995, pp. 253-256, no. 212, ill.; p. 352, no. 552, ill. 

⁶ Bertolino, Poli1995, pp. 359, no. 587, ill.; alba 2014-15, pp. 192-193, no. 47, ill. 

⁷ The cited paintings date to 1935-36. Bertolino, Poli 1995, respectively, p. 356, no. 573 and no. 575, ill.; p. 357, no. 576, ill. 

⁸ Turin 1937, np.