Arturo Martini

Arturo Martini
(Treviso, 1889 Milan, 1947)
Nena
1930
refractory terracotta; 45 x 24, 5 x 27 cm
Inscriptions: based on "Martini"
The intense sculpture depicting the daughter of Martini, Maria, affectionately called Nena, born in 1921, is exhibited for the first time, under the title La mia bambina, in Turin in the autumn of 1930 (and that specimen purchased for the Casa Reale collections) having been modeled during the summer in Albisola, at the Casa dell'Arte of Angelo Barile. Several testimonies allow us to reconstruct the situation in which the child was depicted: Nena, in fact, is caught facing the window of a train while she is leaving for the boarding school with her arms held close to the bust and protruding from the basement and the expression profoundly melancholy , emphasized by the slightly ajar mouth.
Known since its first appearance, the work has aroused the interest and attention of contemporary critics and its constant reproduction in the period magazines has established its fortune with a large public, which justifies its numerous replicas; the same Carrà speaks of it with enthusiasm: "Here the realistic observation tends to become linear style and harmony, and already the material vibrates with a new rigor of natural truth that is no longer just volume architecture, but restrained form and poetic feeling" (Carrà 1933, quoted in Arturo Martini 2014, p. 60). The absolute modernity of this work is combined with the meditation of Martini on the iconographic theme of the Melancholy, already faced several times both in the ceramic production, and in terracotta sculpture, which had already found a solution of déco taste in the Portrait of the poet Chekhov ( 1921-1922, table 8. 12). In this empathic image of his daughter, the sculptor freed himself from the motif of the classical bust and proposed an unprecedented, deliberately asymmetrical cut and full adherence to the values ​​of the twentieth century, in a perfect balance between intimism and monumentality, realism and abstraction.
Bibliography: Arturo Martini 2014, p. 60.
Valerio Terraroli

Author: Arturo Martini
Dimensions: 45x24,5x27 cm.
Year: 1930