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 to the Royal Institute for Book Illustration of Urbino where he learned printing techniques: lithography, screenprint, etching, and xylography. After completing his studies, he moved to Milan where he met and associated with artists such as Dino Buzzati, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Raffaele Carrieri.
After a brief experience at Olivetti as the art director of the company magazine, he moved to Canzo in the province of Como to dedicate himself entirely to painting. Here he purchased and renovated a huge 19th-century spinning mill to adapt it into a studio, which today is the headquarters of the Fondazione Salvatore Fiume.
His first solo exhibition is held at the Galleria Borromini in Milan in 1949. The exhibition is a great critical success, so much so that Alfred H. Barr Jr., director of the MoMA, Museum of Modern Art in New York, purchases the Città di statue from 1947, which is still preserved there today. In the same year, he also takes part in the exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art held at the MoMA. The following year, he is invited to the Venice Biennale where he exhibits the triptych Isola di statue, which is now 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 a huge painting to be displayed in the first-class lounge of the Andrea Doria ocean liner, 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 the Adventures, Misadventures, and Glories of the Ancient Region of Umbria, from which Salvatore Fiume's interest in Renaissance painting is evident.
Between 1962 and 1997, a period of travels and exhibitions around the world began for Salvatore Fiume, which greatly enriched his artistic personality.
In 1962, a traveling exhibition with more than one hundred paintings by the artist was organized, which would be 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 traveled to Ethiopia, in the valley of Babile, where he painted his Islands on a group of rocks using marine paints.
In 1974, the great retrospective exhibition at Palazzo Reale di Milano took place, during which Salvatore Fiume created a life-size polystyrene reproduction of a portion of the painted rocks in Ethiopia, almost entirely occupying the enormous Sala delle Cariatidi. On the same occasion, he presented for the first time the African Mona Lisa, now housed in the Vatican Museums.
In 1993, the painter visits the places of Paul Gauguin in Polynesia and, in homage to the great French master, donates a painting to the Museo Gauguin di Papeari a Tahiti. Salvatore Fiume dies in Milan in 1997.