Marcello Mascherini

Letter from Marcello Mascherini to Nesto Jacometti - 1956

1956

Marcello Mascherini, was born in Udine in 1906. After the Art School in Isernia e continued to cultivate his sculptural practice, completing an apprenticeship in the studio of Franco Asco (1899-1970). In 1924, he made his debut at the city's Circolo Artistico of Trieste. Among the first known works of the very young Marcello Mascherini are the expressive and evocative plaster masks he made in 1928 for the Politeama Theatre in Trieste, commissioned by the architect Umberto Nordio. From the 1930s onwards and after meeting Arturo Martini (1889-1947), he began to work on a larger scale, developing the idea of figures with rough skin and faces reminiscent of Etruscan statuary, expressing archaic virtues such as work, motherhood and communion with nature. In 1931, when he was only 25 years old, he was noticed by the Trieste architect Gustavo Pulitzer Finali, who designed the interior of the motorship Victoria, and who asked him to decorate the first class banquet hall. This moment marked the beginning of his prestigious collaborations with artists and architects such as Libero Andreotti and Gio Ponti and, in fact, opened the way for him to decorate ships and transatlantic liners, which would last until the 1960s. From 1934 onwards, and for another eleven editions, he was also presented at the Venice Biennale. Mascherini was awarded prizes and recognitions at the Rome Quadrennial and the Venice Biennial, with suggestive works such as the group of animated and primitivist Small Bronzes exhibited at the 1934 Biennale, or such as Eve and Susanna presented at the 1939 Quadrennial. The sculptor's success was not only in Italy, but also at the foreign exhibitions organised by the Biennale, for example, in 1936, he received the Diploma of Honour at the Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Art in Budapest. As the years went by, the threadlike, elongated figures were increasingly replaced by full, rounded volumes that fit into space with greater awareness and dynamism, always of an archaic nature, as can be seen in the female sculptures Venus Marina, presented at the Quadriennale in Rome in 1943. The 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were mainly marked by the artistic contributions the sculptor made to the world of theatre and set design. In 1953 he made a fundamental trip to Paris, where he saw the studio of Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), whose synthetic linearism he absorbed. The post-war period was marked by his abandonment of rounded forms and his move towards an expressive and angular primitivism, in sculptures such as the dramatic Project for the 1958 Aushwitz Monument for the Risiera di San Sabba. For the production in transatlantic liner, the artist relies on a style halfway between the re-elaboration of 15th-century sculpture and a personal language, sometimes filiform and sometimes fuller and more graceful, consisting of a playful and vital line, which flows into an extremely modern expressionism of international prestige. Active until the end, the sculptor died in Padua in 1983 at the age of seventy-seven.