Marino Marini

Marino Marini was born in Pistoia on February 27, 1901. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 1917 and from around 1922 he devoted himself mainly to sculpture, without however abandoning painting. Starting from these years, his works are influenced by Etruscan art and the sculpture of Arturo Martini. In 1929 he took over from Martini as teacher at the Villa Reale School of Art in Monza and held the position until 1940. During this period he traveled several times to Paris, where he joined Massimo Campigli, Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Magnelli and Philip de Pisis. In 1936 he was in Switzerland, in Tenero-Locarno in the Canton of Ticino, and in the following years he often visited Zurich and Basel, where he became friends with Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacometti and Fritz Wotruba. In 1936 he won the Rome Quadrennial Prize; in 1940 he was awarded the chair of sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan. In 1946 he settled permanently in Milan. In 1944 he took part in the exhibition "Twentieth-Century Italian Art" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1950 Curt Valentin exhibited works by Marini in his Buchholz Gallery: on this occasion the artist went to New York, where he met Jean (Hans) Arp, Alexander Calder, Max Beckmann, Jacques Lipchitz and Lyonel Feininger. On his return to Europe, he stopped in London for a personal exhibition organized at the Hanover Gallery, and here he met Henry Moore. In 1951 one of his exhibitions, set up at the Kestner-Gesellschaft Hannover, was subsequently presented at the Kunstverein in Hamburg and at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. In 1952 he was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale, and in 1954 the Feltrinelli Prize at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. In 1959 one of his monumental sculptures was placed in The Hague. Retrospectives on his work took place in 1962 at the Kunsthaus Zurich and in 1966 at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. In 1963-64 he exhibited his paintings for the first time at the Toninelli Arte Moderna gallery in Milan. In 1973 the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan inaugurated a permanent exhibition of his works, and in 1978 the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo dedicated an exhibition to him. Marini died in Viareggio on 6 August 1980.