Alberto Salietti

Outskirts of Milan - Etching by Alberto Salietti - 1940s

1940s

Alberto Salietti was born in Ravenna on March 15, 1892. Despite having played almost the totality of his artistic career in Milan and Liguria, Alberto Salietti, a painter, engraver, mosaicist and fresco, has remained a reference point for Romagna painters, especially between the two wars. After moving with his family to Milan, Salietti attended the Brera Academy until 1914. In 1920, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale and in 1922 in Milan with Oppi, Dudreville, Tosi and Malerba. After the Venice Biennale of 1924, he joined the Novecento movement of which he became secretary in 1925. In 1926, he exhibited at the “First exhibition of the Italian twentieth century" and in 1927 he was among the founders of the Group of seven modern painters together with Funi, Sironi, Tosi, Carrà, Marussig and Bernasconi. In 1929 he exhibited in Barcelona, in 1937 in Paris, then at the II and III Rome Quadriennale and at the Venice Biennale of 1942 where he won the Grand Prize for painting. In 1933, he was appointed the corresponding member of the Wiener Secession and from 1933–36 he was a member of the Superior Council for Antiquities and Fine Arts in Rome. In 1941 he moved permanently to Chiavari. The most important posthumous exhibitions include the one held at the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan in 1964 and 1972 one in Chiavari. As a portraitist and landscape painter, Salietti, a patient distiller of post-impressionist, secessionist and twentieth-century influencer, has made an original contribution to Italian art, distinguishing itself by a joyful and optimistic adherence to reality, immune from intellectualism and ideologies. He died at Chiavari, in 1961.