Mario Sironi

Sironi was born in Sassari on May 12, 1885. In 1902 he enrolled in the faculty of engineering at the University of Rome, but soon abandoned his studies. The following year he began attending the Scuola Libera del Nudo where he met Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. In 1905 he took part in the "Exposition of the Society of Amateurs and Connoisseurs" and began working as an illustrator for the socialist newspaper "L'Avanti della Domenica". He went to Paris in 1906, then to Munich in 1908 and to Frankfurt in 1910. Prone to depression, he spent long periods of his youth in isolation from others and then destroyed most of his early pointillist works. Towards the end of 1913 he joined Futurism and the following year he took part in the "Free Futurist Exhibition" at the Sprovieri Gallery. In 1915 he moved to Milan, where he took over from Ardengo Soffici in the Futurist group. The same year he signed the interventionist manifesto of Futurism The Italian pride and during the First World War he went to the front with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Antonio Sant'Elia. In 1919 he took part in the "Grande Mostra Futurista" organized in Milan by Marinetti to demonstrate the strength of the movement in the immediate post-war period. The same year he held his first solo exhibition at the Casa d'Arte Bragaglia in Rome. In 1920, together with Russolo and other early futurists, Sironi signed the manifesto Against all returns to painting. Between 1919 and 1921 he painted the famous series of urban landscapes that transform De Chirico's haunting Italian squares into contemporary scenes of the Milanese industrial suburbs. In 1922 he was one of the founding members of the Sette di Novecento group in Milan and became the leader of the Novecento group. He became the main political caricaturist and illustrator for Mussolini's official press "Il Popolo d'Italia" (1927-33) and "La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d'Italia" (1934-39). Sironi was also the major theoretician of mural painting, which he carried out receiving important commissions from the regime, and in 1933 he wrote the authoritative Mural Painting Manifesto. After the Second World War he returned to traditional painting with a style in line with the informal abstract movement. In 1956 he was elected a member of the Accademia di San Luca. Sironi died in Milan on August 13, 1961.