FRANCO VILLORESI ©

FRANCO VILLORESI

Franco Villoresi (Città di Castello (PG), 9 september 1920 - Rigutino (AR), 29 september 1975), painter among the most known and appreciated of the immediate second post-war period, was a cultured and versatile artist (he was also a writer). He attended the Liceo Classico in Rome and the Faculty of Law (without obtaining a degree), but his interests were initially literary. It was the knowledge, in the late '30s, with Curzio Malaparte, to give him the first opportunity to work (as a proofreader and, later, as a contributor to the magazine "Perspectives"). An anti-fascist, after September 8, 1943 he went into hiding in Tuscany, near Arezzo, and made contact with the nuclei of the Resistance. Wanted, he fled to Veneto, where he remained until 1945. In those years, he founded and directed the magazine "Insurrezione". It was in the autumn of 1945 that, arrived in Rome, he exhibited (on the occasion of an exhibition on contemporary design at the gallery "Il Cortile") drawings and watercolors made in the years as a partisan. Another fundamental friendship for VIlloresi was that with Mario Mafai, who hosted him in his studio. The '50s were those of consecration, crowned with the personal exhibition at the gallery "Showcase", curated by its own sodal Mafai. Numerous exhibitions followed in Italy and abroad (also conquering the American collectors, led by the great director John Huston). In 1958, following a serious car accident, he decided to move near Arezzo (the city where he had lived his childhood), in Rigutino, where he remained until his death. Villoresi's best-known subjects (foggy suburbs, workers leaving factories, urban and suburban views), were also the most popular with collectors, but he also explored other subjects (known cycle of masks) pushing up to the informal (collages), enjoying great success with audiences and critics, consecrating him as a complete artist, in spite of those who had called him only "twilight". The Piero Della Francesca Art Gallery, which has always been one of Villoresi's reference galleries, has dedicated three personal exhibitions to him, including an important anthological exhibition.