To mark the centenary of the birth of Giuseppe Santomaso (Venice 1907-1990), the Giorgio Cini Foundation and Intesa Sanpaolo have organised a retrospective exhibition on the work of the Venetian artist from his early days to the height of his mature period, curated by Nico Stringa. Twenty-five years on from the last exhibition dedicated to him by the City of Venice, the centenary provides us with an opportunity to reconsider Santomaso’s complex creative development. He rid himself of the provincial limits of the Veneto School through long stays abroad, especially in Paris, where in 1937 he visited the Universal Exposition and admired the works on show, including Picasso’s Guernica. An initial turning point after his Parisian sojourn and first-hand knowledge of Braque and his work led Santomaso to become one of the few Italian artists to meditate – in still lifes and a series of interior paintings – on the potential of cubist language. In this exhibition the Venetian painter’s originality is explored through comparisons with contemporaries. The exhibition is not simply meant to be a one-man show but a chance to extensively revisit Italian abstract art in the second half of the 20th century. There are thus also works by Afro, Renato Birolli, Mario De Luigi, Leone Minassian, Zoran Music, Armando Pizzinato, Emilio Vedova, Bice Lazzari, Tancredi, Antonio Corpora, Virgilio Guidi and Toti Scialoja, testifying to the more or less remote or close dialogue between Santomaso and the leading players in the Italian movement known as Arte informale, and works by Braque, Poliakoff, Winter. Moreover, also on show are many of Santomaso’s main graphic works from the second half of the 1930s and some rare art editions that he created or edited: from Grand air by Paul Eluard (1945) to the lithographs for Ezra Pound’s On angle, the drawings for poems by Andrea Zanzotto. In this field Santomaso’s creativity has unanimously been hailed as setting a benchmark in the 20th century and his graphic works are among the finest of their kind in Europe. Intesa Sanpaolo’s contribution to the exhibition is particularly important, and consists of the loan of a significant series of paintings by Santomaso and other major artists from the corporate art collections, together with the complete collection of the artist’s printed works.

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