Pompeo Borra biography

- POMPEO BORRA PAINTER

 

Pompeo Borra was an Italian painter. He was born in Milan on January 28, 1898, to a family of humble origins and was orphaned by his father at only 9 years old.

The young Borra decides to attend the technical institute and then continue his studies at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera until, in 1916, he decides to leave as a volunteer to fight on the Italian front during the First World War.

At the end of the war, he returns to Milan and resumes dedicating himself to art and painting, creating a series of paintings characterized by a primitivist nature, in which the characters were only sketched and the final setting seemed to belong to another dimension.

From 1920 onwards, the artist will consistently participate in various exhibitions of the Famiglia Artistica Milanese, which lead him to establish himself on the national scene and achieve important milestones, such as participating in the Venice Biennale. Pompeo Borra's works, in fact, are exhibited for the first time in 1924 and are all characterized by the presence of powerful and strong subjects with primitive features. Thanks to this exhibition, the artist is noticed by Carlo Carrà, who decides to praise his compositions despite the harsh features of the characters.

The works of Pompeo Borra are influenced by the artistic movements of the 20th century, which is why the painter will manage to join various intellectual circles, including the one led by Margherita Sarfatti, with whom he will have the opportunity to collaborate both in Italy and abroad.

In the following years, he organizes a solo exhibition at the Galleria Bardi in Milan, where he decides to display old and new works characterized by a drastic change, especially regarding the brightness and intensity of the colors. If the paintings of Pompeo Borra were distinguished by rather dark and gloomy shades, now they focus on the presence of clear and bright colors, capable of emphasizing not only the scene of the painting, but also the expressions of all the characters depicted in it.

In 1936, the artist decided to go to Paris in 1936 to distance himself from what he considered the classical influences of Italian culture.

Following this experience, however, Pompeo Borra undergoes a further change that leads him to approach the style of Matisse, thus using very intense colors such as blue, red, yellow, and green, elements that characterize a new pictorial style, which will be very popular in the years to come.

The artist has never hidden their political ideas. so much so that he was arrested in 1940 for his anti-fascist ideas.

When the Second World War also ends, Pompeo Borra returns to his beloved painting, also delving into other subjects, such as art criticism, which leads him to publish a treatise on Piero della Francesca.

In this particular period of his life, the painter is intensely dedicated to depicting individuals isolated from society, using very intense colors to denote their social position and ensure that each figure assumes the right importance in his world, given that in the real one they were only discredited.

In 1951, Pompeo Borra obtained the chair of painting at Brera, becoming first a professor and then director of the academy until 1970.

In the last period of his life, he dedicated himself to perfecting the painting of female faces, giving them characteristics he had never focused on before and intensifying the expressiveness of the woman, whose fundamental trait was precisely the gaze..

Pompeo Borra passes away in Milan in 1973.