Salvatore Fiume biography

Salvatore Fiume was an Italian painter and sculptor. He was born in Comiso in the province of Ragusa in 1915. At sixteen he won a scholarship for the Royal Institute for the Illustration of Books of Urbino where he learned printing techniques: lithography, screen printing, etching and xylography . After completing his studies, he moved to Milan where he met and frequented artists such as Dino Buzzati, Salvatore Quasimodo and Raffaele Carrieri.
After a brief experience at Olivetti as art director of the company magazine , he moved to Canzo in the province of Como to dedicate himself completely to painting. Here he purchased and renovated an enormous nineteenth-century spinning mill to adapt it to a studio, which has now become the headquarters of the Fondazione Salvatore Fiume.
His first solo exhibition was held at the Galleria Borromini in Milan in 1949. The exhibition had such great critical success that Alfred H. Barr Jr., director of the Moma, Museum of Modern Art in New York, purchased the t12>City of statues from 1947 which is still preserved there today. In the same year he also took part in the Twentieth-Century Italian Art exhibition which was also held at the MoMa. The following year he was invited to the Venice Biennale where he exhibited the triptych Island of statues which today is part of the collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Vatican Museums.
A period of important commissions begins including that of the architect Gio Ponti in 1951 for an enormous painting to be exhibited in the first class lounge of the transatlantic Andrea Doria, that of the magazines Life and Time for a series of works depicting an imaginary history of Manhattan and New York Bay and that of Bruno Buitoni Sr for a cycle of ten large paintings on the theme of Adventures, misfortunes and glories of the ancient Region of Umbria, from which Salvatore Fiume's interest in Renaissance painting is evident.
Between 1962 and 1997 he began for Salvatore Fiume was a phase of travel and exhibitions all over the world which considerably enriched his artistic personality.
In 1962 a traveling exhibition was organized with more than one hundred paintings by the painter which was hosted in various German museums including those in the cities of Cologne and Regensburg.
In 1973, accompanied by his photographer friend Walter Mori, Salvatore Fiume went to Ethiopia, in the Babile valley, where he painted the his Islands on a group of rocks using marine paints.
1974 saw the great anthological exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan on the occasion of which Salvatore Fiume created a reproduction in polystyrene, life-size, of a part of the painted rocks in Ethiopia, occupying almost entirely the enormous Hall of the Caryatids. On the same occasion he presented for the first time the African Mona Lisa, now preserved in the Vatican Museums.
In 1993 the painter visited Paul Gauguin's places in Polynesia and, in homage to the great French master, donated a painted at the Gauguin Museum of Papeari in Tahiti. Salvatore Fiume died in Milan in 1997.