Guglielmo Achille Cavellini
Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, also known as GAC, was an Italian artist and art collector. After his initial activity as a painter, in the 1940s and 1950s, he became one of the major collectors of contemporary Italian abstract art, developing a deep relationship of patronage and friendship with the artists. This experience has its pinnacle in the exhibition Modern painters of the Cavellini collection at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 1957. In the 1960s Cavellini resumed his activity as an artist, with an ample production spanning from Neo-Dada to performance art to mail art, of which he became one of the prime exponents with the Exhibitions at Home and the Round Trip works. In 1971 he invented autostoricizzazione, upon which he acted to create a deliberate popular history surrounding his existence. He also authored the books Abstract Art, Man painter, Diary of Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, Encounters/Clashes in the Jungle of Art and Life of a Genius.
Biography
Guglielmo Achille Cavellini was born in Brescia on 11 September 1914. His parents were from Tuscany, coming from two small villages over Pontremoli, in the Lunigiana. After the marriage and the birth of their first daughter Adele in 1900, they moved to Switzerland where the father worked as a bricklayer, then became a hawker in Lombardy. They lived for some time in Arona, on the Lake Maggiore, where in 1911 their son Mario was born. Then they moved to Brescia, where they opened a store called Bazar 33. In 1918 Adele died from the Spanish flu.Cavellini studied for nine years at the Cesare Arici Jesuit college. At 16 years he started the Istituto tecnico, but he was forced to interrupt his studies to help his parents in the store. Since his childhood he drew and painted, mainly landscapes. In 1935 he met Lisetta, his first girlfriend and future wife. In 1938 in Cortina d'Ampezzo he befriended the painter Domenico Mucci, who gave him painting lessons.
In 1941 Cavellini was conscripted in the Second World War, and was sent to an anti-aircraft base in Bergamo. On 11 August 1941 he married Lisetta, then was dismissed from the army because of a peptic ulcer. On 10 September 1942 his daughter Mariella was born, and then Cavellini went back to the army until the end of the war.
From 1945 to 1948 he drew and painted frequently. In the same period he visited the Feroldi collection, which included The Disquieting Muses by Giorgio de Chirico, the Lying Nude by Amedeo Modigliani, and works by Giorgio Morandi, Henri Rousseau, André Derain, Alfred Sisley and Paul Cézanne. He also visited Venice, where he painted landscapes, and Burano, where he met the painter Filippo De Pisis. At the Procuratie, in front of the Tempest by Giorgione, he met artist Emilio Vedova. Vedova proposed to organize an exhibition in Cavellini's house, with the help of painter Giuseppe Santomaso and art critics Giuseppe Marchiori and Marco Valsecchi.
The collector
The exhibition was successful, and many young artists contacted Cavellini to ask him to show their works. Among them was Renato Birolli, whom Cavellini befriended and from whom he acquired the 86 Drawings of the Resistance and the painting The Woman and the Moon. In December of the same year Birolli and Ennio Morlotti traveled to Paris on a scholarship of the French government. In June 1947 Cavellini met them in Paris with his wife, and there he visited the main museums of the city, the art galleries and the studios of artists Gino Severini, Óscar Domínguez, Édouard Pignon and Henry Adam. He was disheartened by the comparison to the great artists of the past and present, so he decided to abandon painting and work full-time on his commercial activity and on his collection.In the same year he acquired two paintings by Renato Guttuso, and in March 1948 he traveled to Rome because one of his paintings was exhibited at the Rome Quadriennale in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Valle Giulia. There he met Guttuso, whom he befriended, and art critic and historian Lionello Venturi who had just returned to Italy after his exile during Fascism. Venturi recognized the importance of Cavellini's work and in 1953 published an article about him in the daily newspaper La Stampa. Because of his sudden popularity, Cavellini's father and brother, who was president of the chamber of commerce of the province of Brescia, asked him to avoid contact with artists because they were afraid they might be communists. Despite this Cavellini kept collecting art and visiting artists in Rome in the weekends, especially the home of Guttuso and his studio in the park of Villa Massimo. There he met the artists of the Group of Eight and acquired many of their works, among them Sacco e nero 3 by Burri.
At the following Rome Quadriennale Cavellini bought numerous works by abstract artists like Franchina, Consagra, Corpora and Capogrossi. At the end of 1949, and then again in 1951, he traveled to Paris to acquire works by Hans Hartung, Maurice Estève, Alfred Manessier, Jean René Bazaine, Gustave Singier, Pierre Tal-Coat, Jean Le Moal, Léon Gischia and Gérard Ernest Schneider. Meanwhile, the family store enjoyed great success and expanded, changing its name from Bazar 33 to Grandi Magazzini 33. On 4 February 1946 Cavellini's son Piero was born. In 1950 his brother moved and he was left the entire family villa, which was restructured by architect Mario Baciocchi. Part of the house was transformed into a true art gallery, which was set up by graphic designer AG Fronzoni The house-gallery was inaugurated with the participation of seven artists from the Group of Eight, art critic Giuseppe Marchiori and writer Giancarlo Fusco. In the spring of the same year the gallery was also visited by Katherine Dunham and Josephine Baker.
In February 1953 Cavellini travels to Milan to meet Atanasio Soldati, the father of Italian abstract art, shortly before his death, and he acquired two of his paintings. He started to receive the interest of art critics and museum managers, meeting Lionello Venturi, Giulio Carlo Argan, the director of the Louvre, Georges Salles, and museologist Georges Henri Rivière. The magazine XX Siecle, edited by Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, published a long article about Cavellini written by professor Argan. In February 1954 Cavellini traveled to Paris where he met San Lazzaro, acquired paintings by Jean René Bazaine and Raoul Ubac and met Joan Miró and gallerist Aimé Maeght. With the help of San Lazzaro he bought a painting by Alberto Magnelli and 16 drawings by Jean Fautrier. Then he visited the studios of Gerard Ernest Schneider, Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean Dubuffet, Victor Brauner, Léon Gischia and André-Pojet. Thanks to Gildo Caputo, director of the Galerie de France, he was able to meet Alfred Manessier and acquire his work Ce qui était perdu. In Paris he met by chance Italian designer Bruno Munari. In 1955 Cavellini's gallery was visited by German art historian Werner Haftmann and by the founder of documenta Arnold Bode, who asked him to contribute to the exhibition. While in Kassel he bought a burning by Alberto Burri.
In the same year Cavellini's gallery was visited by art historians Vittorio Viale and Palma Bucarelli, and then by poets Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Beniamino Joppolo and French painter Maurice Estève. In January 1956 he went back to Paris where he met San Lazzaro and bought a painting by Serge Poliakoff. He also met Lucio Fontana in his studio in Milan and acquired from him one of his holes, a painting by Osvaldo Licini and one by Asger Jorn. In 1957 Palma Bucarelli asked Cavellini to exhibit at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, which she managed. The exhibition, titled Modern Painters of the Cavellini Collection, consisted of 180 works and was inaugurated on 24 May 1957 at the presence of Italian Minister of Education Pietro Campilli. The exhibition received positive reviews from, among others, art critics Lionello Venturi, Giulio Carlo Argan, Giuseppe Marchiori and Guido Ballo, and also by Francesco Arcangeli, Attilio Bertolucci, Enrico Crispolti, Maurizio Calvesi and Alfredo Mezio. At the start of 1958 the exhibition moved to La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, then to Kunsthalle in Basel and finally to Germany at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden and at the Landolins museum in Esslingen am Neckar.
''Abstract Art'' and ''Man Painter''
On 2 June 1958 Cavellini published his first book Arte astratta, printed by Giampiero Giani and presented at the Venice Biennale. The book participated in the Viareggio Prize, reaching the final selection. Abstract Art was positively reviewed by Elda Fezzi, Guido Ballo, Giorgio Kaisserlian, Duilio Morosini, Angelo Dragone and Rosanna Apicella. Some pages of Cavellini's diary were published by Alfredo Mezio on the magazine Mondo, directed by Mario Pannunzio. In the summer of the same year he travelled to London with his daughter Mariella, and there he met painter John Latham and bought some of his works. In the same period he visited the exhibitions by Yves Klein at the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan, those by Arman and Shusaku Arakawa at the Arturo Schwarz Gallery in Milan, the group exhibitions by Luciano Pistoi and Michel Tapié in Turin and the ones set up by Attilio Codognato in Venice. At one of those exhibitions he met Christo, who then visited Cavellini's home.On 31 May 1960, Cavellini published his second book Uomo pittore, which included his diary and his correspondence with Renato Birolli, who had died on 3 May 1959. In January 1961 Cavellini went back to Paris where he met Georges Mathieu, Jean Fautrier. On 16 and 23 April 1961 he published on L'Europeo his report of the two meetings. In Paris he also met Pierre Alechinsky, Philip Martin and Hisao Domoto. He was also visited in Brescia by Italian painter Tancredi Parmeggiani, who would commit suicide a few years later. In 1960 the Venice Biennale focused on arte informale, awarding Jean Fautrier and Hans Hartung. Cavellini visited the Biennale and met artists Renato Guttuso, Alberto Burri, Emilio Vedova and Luigi Nono.