- MICHELE CASCELLA ARTWORKS

- MICHELE CASCELLA PAINTER

Michael Cascella was a painter It is twilight landscaper. He was born in the province of Chieti in Ortona sul mare in 1892. He comes from a large family known in the artistic sector between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Given his poor academic results, his father, an artist dedicated to painting, ceramics and lithography, initiated him into art and welcomed him into his chromolithographic laboratory together with his brother Tommaso.

Michele Cascella enters the workshop and begins to become familiar with the tools of the trade by making copies of the drawings by Botticelli and Leonardo. Encouraged and supported by his father, at the age of only fifteen he had 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 current which united the sensory experience with the spiritual one, generating a refined painting full of mythological and religious symbolic references, allowing to explore human consciousness in the border area between dream and reality. He favors the evocative power of color following the logic of art as he was taught.

When the Second World War broke out he was recalled but brought his colors with him to imprint memories of military life. At the end of the war he settled in Milan where he devoted himself to the techniques ofengraving and of ceramic, only later cultivating those of the watercolor.

In Rome, in 1919, holds a personal exhibition at the Bragaglia Gallery and knows on that occasion Carlo Carrà who, attracted by its softness and sweetness, becomes a supporter of naturalistic primitivism by Michele Cascella. Precisely this tendency towards primitivism will open a rift in the history of 20th century art, traditionalist for some, full of subtle modernity behind the apparent traditionalism for others. His artistic work was in oscillation between the old and the new, the flowers, the trees, the mountains and the skies seemed to fill with lightness full of sensuality and spirituality. In his works, the moment that does not repeat itself with exuberant fragility came and is captured. The evanescent sensuality of colors has associated him with Gabriele d'Annunzio for whom his father created the painting of his mother and to whom Michele Cascella dedicates an exhibition that tells Italy from Milan to Naples. During the 1930s, the painter made extensive use of watercolor, recreating serene views of towns and cities, exhibiting in Brussels, Paris, London and receiving numerous acclaim. 

Since 1928 al 1942 exhibits in all editions of the Venice Art Biennale. In 1933 he collaborated with the Corriere della sera, proposing line drawings that depicted city landscapes. 

After the Second World War his exhibitions abroad become more frequent: Paris but also South America, above all Buenos Aires e Montevideo, and United States where will settle for long periods of time, alternating periods of stay in Italy ed in Europa. 

Michele Cascella died in Milan in 1989.