Mario Sironi

Mario Sironi (May 12, 1885 – August 13, 1961) was an Italian modernist artist who was active as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and designer. His typically somber paintings are characterized by massive, immobile forms.

He was born in Sassari on the island of Sardinia. His father was an engineer; his maternal grandfather was the architect and sculptor Ignazio Villa. Sironi spent his childhood in Rome. He embarked on the study of engineering at the University of Rome but quit after a nervous breakdown in 1903, one of many severe depressions that would recur throughout his life. Thereafter he decided to study painting, and began attending the Scuola Libera del Nudo of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. There he met Giacomo Balla, who became "his first real teacher". Sironi returned to Milan in 1905 before traveling to Paris in 1906. Like his friends Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni, he began painting in a Divisionist style under the guidance of Balla. Sironi's works from this period include self-portraits and portraits of his family.

He saw Expressionist works during visits to Germany between 1908 and 1911, but mainly stayed in Rome from 1909 to 1914. By 1913, Balla, Boccioni and Severini had developed a new style—Futurism—which Sironi also adopted for a brief time, although his work showed little of the characteristic Futurist exaltation of speed and modernity. In 1914 he exhibited with the Futurists at the Galleria Sprovieri in Rome. Works from this period include several abstract tempera paintings entitled Composizione futurista (1915), a series of paintings of airplanes in tempera or tempera with collage, and several paintings of lone cyclists or motorcyclists.

Sironi served in World War I as a member of the Lombard Volunteer Cyclists and Drivers. After the war, he abandoned Futurism and developed a style that emphasized massive, immobile forms. In paintings such as La Lampada of 1919 (Pinateca di Brera, Milan), mannequins substitute for figures, as in the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. In 1922, Sironi was one of the founders of the Novecento Italiano movement, which was part of the return to order in European art during the post-war period. Paintings such as Venere of 1921–1923 (Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Turin) and Solitudine ("Solitude", 1925; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome), with their contained, geometric forms, bear some kinship to the neoclassicism evident in works produced at the same time by Picasso.

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