- Header
- Anselmo Bucci
- Also known as
-
Anselmo Bucci
-
primary name: Bucci, Anselmo
- Details
- individual; painter/draughtsman; printmaker; Italian; Male
- Life dates
- 1887-1955
- Biography
- (Text by Martin Hopkinson)
Figurative painter, etching and drypoint printmaker. Born in Fossombrone near Pesaro, Bucci was brought up in Cittadella and Este. He studied for a year in 1905 at the Accademia di Brera in Milan with Vespasiano Bignami, Giuseppe Mentessi and Cesare Tallone, where he met Carrà and established a close friendship with Leonardo Dudreville. With Dudreville and the writer and philosopher Mario Buggelli, Bucci travelled to Paris in 1906, where he was to live with a few interruptions until 1914. He quickly made friends with other expatriates including Severini, Modigliani and Viani, and also became acquainted with Rodin, Picasso, Apollinaire, Dufy, Utrillo and Suzanne Valadon. It is possible that it was the latter who taught Bucci to make prints since his first plate made in 1907 was a soft-ground etching. He was taught pure etching by Manuel Robbe in the autumn of 1908. He met Boccioni when on a visit to Milan that year. Bucci also frequented the circle of the Spanish Realist painters, the most significant of whom was Zuloaga, and he knew and admired the French painter, Jules Adler. He quickly attracted attention for a series of 25 small drypoints, 'Paris qui bouge', of 1908, and a further set of 50 issued the following year under the same title. They were printed and published by the Galerie Devambez. These prints were shown in the Groupe Libre exhibition in Brussels in 1911. The subjects were Parisian street life captured from unusual viewpoints, from balconies, familiar from Impressionist painting, snail level or close ups. The influence of photography and of Japanese prints is evident. Bucci admired the work of Ensor. Later in the year he made some prints of Rouen cathedral, possibly inspired by his famous etching 'La cathédrale'. In Bucci's drypoints unlike most of his contemporaries among French printmakers there is no attempt at individual description and the urban mass is reduced to scrabbling insects.
Further prints resulted from trips to Sardinia and Algeria in 1912. Bucci's oil paintings of this period have the realism of Zuloaga and his portrait drypoints may also have been influenced by Spanish art. Several Parisian publishers sold his prints, including Pierrefort and Manzi et Joyant. Pellet and Le Garrec dealt in his small drypoints of Paris and Brittany, the latter the result of a trip of 1913.
From 1915 Bucci served alongside many of the Futurists in the Cyclists' Batallion of the Italian army. His keen interest in cycling led much later to a series of paintings of the Giro d'Italia. Bucci's experiences at the front led to 'Croquis du Front Italien', published in Paris by D'Alignan, and included in the huge exhibition 'La mostra di Guerra di Anselmo Bucci', at the Palazzo San Giorgio in Genoa in March 1917. These unsentimental and unheroic drypoints are the finest prints produced by an Italian artist in the First World War. The Genoa exhibition was followed by a smaller show 'Arte di Guerra' in Milan at the Galleria Pesaro, his first of many collaborations with the leading dealer Lino Pesaro. Two further publications, published by Alfieri et Lacroix, resulted from the conflict, 'Marina a terra' of 1918, an album of sketches and drawings which covered Bucci's experience of the advance to the Piave, and 'Finis Austriae' of 1919, 12 colour lithographs devoted to the fall of the Austrian Empire. He did not much care for lithography, preferring the directness of drypoint.
In the years after the war Bucci divided his time between Milan and Paris, before settling in Milan in 1922. The following year he suggested the name Novecento for a group of seven artists associated with the Galleria Pesaro. The other six were Dudreville, Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi and Sironi. The writer Margherita Sarfatti, art critic of Mussolini's newspaper, Popolo d'Italia, was their spokesman. The name proclaimed the group's intention to promote a renewed Italian art. His show of 280 works at the Galleria Pesaro in 1923 included both oils and drypoints. He was to remain closely attached to the gallery, when the group transferred to the rival Galleria Milano. The style of both Bucci's paintings and his prints in the 1920s parallels that of German artists associated with Neue Sachlichkeit. Some of his finest prints in this vein were portraits. Bucci became particularly interested in animal subjects. One of the results was of a set of etched illustrations to Kipling's 'The Jungle Book', published in 1926 and exhibited in 1933 in Brussels in an exhibition of Italian fine books. Bucci wrote to the introduction to the catalogue of the 1930 exhibition of his etchings at the Galleria Michelazzi in Trieste in which he explained that he used a roulette to produce the greys in his prints and that his editions were always small. That year he was much occupied with designing furniture, tapestries, sculpture, pictorial work and all the details for the interiors of three steamships. In the 1930s he painted many landscapes in Spain, the Marches and on the Adriatic coast as well as views of Milan and various European capitals. In 1938 Bucci received the commission for painting a monumental fresco for Milan's Palazzo di Giustizia.
After the destruction of his studio by bombing in 1943, Bucci settled in Monza. There he founded the Sociétà degli Independenti with Natalia Mola, Antonio Arosio and Nicolo Segota. Bucci took a strong stand against the promotion of abstract art in post war Italy, in 1952 refusing an invitation to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, where his work including his prints had been shown regularly from 1920. He was very active as a printmaker to the end of his career. Bucci also published poetry, stories and a number of autobiographical reminiscences. His 1930 'Il pittore volante' shared the first Premio Viareggio. Among his last writings was the introduction to an exhibition of the etchings of Luigi Conconi in Milan in 1952.
- Bibliography
- Carlo Alberto Petrucci, "Le incisioni di Bucci", Rome, Calcografia Nazionale, 1954 (697 nos)
Paolo Biscottini (ed), 'Anslemo Bucci pittore e incisore'. Milan 2005