Emilio Ambron
The emotion of the nude and the magic of the East
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Vernissage:
August, 27 at 6 pm
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Like Emilio Ambron’s many previous international exhibitions - from the first one organised in Alexandria, Egypt in 1922 and the one in Cairo in 1924 that were followed by a remarkable international coverage including Saigon, Angkor, Siena, Milan, Florence, Brussels, Venice, Paris, Cracov and Bali - this exhibition confirms Emilio Ambron’s cosmopolitan status and bravura in drawing. Also, as an heir to the great masters he admired, Emilio Ambron took on the ancient and difficult technique of fresco painting, and has been compared to Duccio, Simone Martini, Botticelli, Signorelli, even with Michelangelo, but also with those who, like the great Puvis de Chevannes, brought fresco painting to modernity.
Ambron’s extremely long career took off in the 1920’s (he was born in Rome in 1905 and died in Florence in 1996).
Just as Picasso returned to figure painting and Classicism in the aftermath of the war, Ambron produced a world of figures that come alive with the magical solidity of volume and the intensity of an atmosphere created within a timeless space, beyond the influences of the constantly modifyng and challenging artistic trends of the 20th century. This inquisitive man, an incessant traveller all over the continents Europe, Africa and Asia, each of which marks a stage of his life, seems instinctively to have sought safety in the power of art over the mutable fragility of nature, transfiguring and as if freezing images so synthetically defined as to make even the most mundane aspects important. In his numerous drawings (always his favourite medium of expression) and in his sculpture (to which he devoted more of his time during the ‘80s and ‘90s), he gives priority to the representation of the figure, in particular the female figure, captured in the naturalness of daily movements and gestures which are transformed into lyrical poses that are elevated, even majestic; and though with artifice clearly idealized, they never loose a dimension of intimacy and charm.
His extraordinary skill of synthesis, representing the essence of reality, is never reduced into an inert academic style of figure drawing but its dynamic force comes from a profound cultural knowledge, derived from the best circles he frequented, that can be traced to the magical atmosphere of the places where he lived and to his unusual education. His early years were divided between the fairytale ‘Moresque’ style home in the Parioli area where he was born and the mysterious villa that was his father Aldo’s home in Alexandria, Egypt. His father was a construction engineer involved in important projects such as the building of the port of Alexandria. Ambron’s career was helped by his mother Amelia, an artist in her own right. When Elica Balla went to Amelia’s home with her father to have her portrait painted she described her as being an “elegant lady, delicate and graceful, but strong-minded”, with a “different expression from other women”. She took part in the salons in Rome, was a talented artist guided by Antonio Mancini who, together with Innocenti, Coleman, Sartorio, Bistolfi, Canonica, Ierace, Cifariello, Gemito and Michetti, were frequent visitors at the beautiful villa in the Parioli, where the great and tenacious 19th century tradition survived.
But it was Emilio’s meeting with Giacomo Balla that was to be the decisive factor in his career. Probably encouraged by another friend of the family, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla (who had now left Futurism behind him) was chosen as being the best tutor when his parents decided that the very young Emilio should become an artist. Starting in 1922, Emilio attended, for six years, the artist’s studio in via Paisiello, dominated by the presence of Impressionist masterpieces of the Divisionist period such as La pazza or the painting of the colossal mother’s head, which became an almost daily experience except for the periods spent in the stimulating and sophisticated atmosphere of Alexandria in Egypt, marginally influenced by the avant-garde movement in Europe. It should not be forgotten that Giuseppe Ungaretti was born there in 1888. To reassure Emilio’s mother of her son’s progress Balla set a note to Amelia Ambron in 1926: “Emilio” – he wrote – “continues the exacting and difficult study of the nude with increasing enthusiasm and fervour, his brush devours canvases and paints but he gains much greater experience. I wish the other young men were like him”. In fact his “modern Classicism”, as Susanna Ragionieri aptly defined it in the catalogue to the retrospective exhibition organised in 1998 at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno di Firenze, was inimitable.
The calm dignity of his nudes steeped in light, not only those that are formed with broad concise taches of colour in the paintings but also those defined with soft strokes of pencil or charcoal on sheets of snowy white paper are bewitching. These drawings are sometimes on a large scale, recalling the monumentality of the preparatory sketches to the fresco series of the ‘50s such as the L’incontro di Dante e Sapia (The Meeting between Dante and Sapia) produced between 1951 and 1954 for the library of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana di Siena, commissioned by one of the most important patrons of the 20th century Count Guido Chigi Saracini, or the large panel painting La Fonte Aretusa, 1958 for the Salone d’Onore of the Italian Room of the Universal Exhibition of Brussels. By taking on themes of classical mythology or modern epics, which by that time were unusual or waning in popularity, he achieves a timeless and symbolic dimension, markedly different from the creative work inspired by his travels, such as the one in 1928 to Eritrea and Somalia in the retinue of the Duca degli Abruzzi, or the decisive trips to Bali that, from 1939 to 1946, and then again, from 1968 on, when he alternated the trips to the island with going to the family estate at Cotorniano, near Siena, which became almost a second homeland to him.
The Room of Prints and Drawings at the Uffizi Gallery to which Ambron gave a large number of beautiful drawings in 195,8 and the Bali Civic Museum to which he left a series of works that he himself chose, are adequate testimony to his creativity in the places that were fundamental to his existential experience and his culture. Scenes from everyday life, monuments of a very different civilisation and the people he met in Egypt or in Bali are depicted with a concise force that is almost antique in flavour, recalling the clean volumes of Masaccio, Paolo Uccello or Piero della Francesca, and at the same time modern, derived from Balla’s legacy. He was also influenced by his favourite reading - the novels of Mark Twain, which he learned by heart, or Steinbeck’s epic The Pastures of Heaven. For these admitted influences and solutions that recall Winlsow Homer, his decorative and monumental paintings, and in particular his wonderful Sienese frescos, have been compared with the murals of the American Thomas Hart Benton, exponent of the Agrarian Tradition and author of the imposing frieze American Today for the New School for Social Research in New York produced using the ancient technique of egg tempera.
In Ambron’s work there is the same nostalgia for an archaic and rural dimension in contrast to urbanisation, which is why he felt more comfortable working in the solitude of Anticoli Corrado, outside Rome, or in the much-loved Cotorniano, and most of all in Bali. His choice of rural as opposed to the urban was surely suggested to him by the circle surrounding the journal “Il Selvaggio” and his long friendship with the artist Baccio Maria Bacci, who from the 20’s onwards worked on the revival of fresco technique. Ambron worked with him in 1937 to produce the life of St. Francis in the convent of Verna. In spite of the fact that Bali was beginning to be visited by the first tourists, Ambron had the “revelation of a natural world contrasted with the artificiality that surrounds me. Here” – he emphasises – “the body in motion vies with the wildness of the environment”.
The wonderful drawings, that for the rest of his life reflect this exalted experience, are distinguished by the form of the nude, sometimes defined by a stroke that recalls Matisse, with the elegant expressiveness of gesture that imparts “to the daily work ” of the Bali people “a dream-like quality”. For these innocent native people painting is, he reflects, “above all a narrative” that “does not need to reflect time and distance”. And as his drawing becomes increasingly full of rhythm and ritual, it is likened to the rhythms of “Asiatic art” without “any visual perspective”, everything being developed “on the plane of the paper and fine canvas – he wrote in 1939-“ just as in the ancient mural paintings where the artist tries to freeze for ever the essence of a scene he has experienced, not the details”. Finally he confesses, “I think about these things for hours while I work. And then when I am tired I set aside my brushes and go to rest on the beach at Sanur. Reclining on the sand I look at the shells that have been washed up in the tide”.
Perhaps in this Pandean abandon lies the heart of his ability to create a timeless beauty, like that pursued by D’Annunzio in the Madrigali dell’estate: (Summer Madrigals)
Come scorrea la calda sabbia lieve
per entro il cavo della mano in ozio,
il cor sentì che il giorno era più breve
E un’ansia repentina il cor m’assalse
per l’appressar dell’umido equinozio
che offusca l’oro delle piagge salse.
Alla sabbia del Tempo urna la mano
Era, clessidra il cor mio palpitante,
l’ombra crescente d’ogni stelo vano
quasi ombra d’ago in tacito quadrante.
(La sabbia del tempo).
Just as the warm light sand runs
to fill my cupped hand in idleness
my heart felt that the day was shorter
And a sudden anxiety seizes my heart
for the damp Equinox is drawing nigh
that dulls the golden salty sands.
My hand is the tomb for the sands of Time,
My beating heart the hourglass,
the growing shadows of every fragile stem
an almost needle-like shadow in a silent sun-dial.
