Michele Cascella biography

Michele Cascella was a painter and twilight landscape artist. He was born in the province of Chieti in Ortona by the sea in 1892. He comes from a large and well-known family in the artistic field between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Due to his poor academic performance, his father, an artist dedicated to painting, ceramics, and lithography, introduced him to art and welcomed him into his chromolithographic workshop along with his brother Tommaso.
Michele Cascella joins the workshop and begins to gain familiarity with the tools of the trade by creating copies of the drawings of Botticelli and Leonardo. Encouraged and supported by his father, at only fifteen years old he has the opportunity to exhibit his works in Milan, Turin, and at the Druet gallery in Paris.
At the beginning, he was inspired by the symbolist movement, which combined sensory experience with spiritual experience, creating a refined painting rich in symbolic, mythological, and religious references, allowing for the exploration of human consciousness in the border area between dream and reality. He favored the evocative power of color, following the logic of art as it had been taught to him.
When World War II breaks out, he is called up but brings his colors with him to capture the memories of military life. At the end of the war, he settles in Milan where he dedicates himself to the techniques of engraving and ceramics, only later cultivating those of watercolor.
In Rome, in 1919, he holds a solo exhibition at the Galleria Bragaglia and meets Carlo Carrà on that occasion, who, attracted by his gentleness and sweetness, becomes a supporter of Michele Cascella's naturalistic primitivism. This very tendency towards primitivism will create a rift in the art history of the 20th century, for some traditionalist, for others laden with subtle modernity behind the apparent traditionalism. His artistic artwork was oscillating between the old and the new, the flowers, trees, mountains, and skies seemed to fill with lightness laden with sensuality and spirituality. In his works, the moment that does not repeat itself was and is captured with exuberant fragility. The evanescent sensuality of the colors linked him to Gabriele d'Annunzio, for whom his father created the painting of the mother and to whom Michele Cascella dedicates an exhibition that tours Italy from Milan to Naples. During the thirties, the painter makes extensive use of watercolor, recreating serene views of towns and cities, exhibiting in Brussels, Paris, London, and receiving numerous accolades.
From 1928 to 1942, he exhibited at all editions of the Venice Art Biennale. In 1933, he collaborated with the Corriere della Sera, offering line drawings depicting cityscapes.
After the Second World War, his exhibitions abroad became more frequent: Paris, but also South America, especially Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and the United States where he would settle for long periods of time, alternating stays in Italy and Europe.
Michele Cascella dies in Milan in 1989.