Giovanni Stradone

He was born in Nola on 10 November 1911. From childhood he demonstrated a great talent for drawing and painting, frequenting the house and studio of the painter Ferruccio Ferrazzi as a teenager until 1927. He attended classical high school, and after graduating, at his father’s insistence, he enrolled in the faculty of Law, which he never attended. In his youth he also developed a passion for entomology.

Around 1929 he created his first paintings, which featured a dear friend from his adolescence: Marcello Venturoli, who later became an important art critic, with whom Stradone would have an intense but also conflictual relationship throughout his life. In the 1930s he approached the “Roman School”, in the footsteps of Scipione and Mafai, but his language was acquiring increasingly individual and original characteristics. His artistic personality acquired relevance starting from the 1940s: his consecration occurred with the Bergamo Prize of 1942, where he obtained the 3rd prize (after Guttuso and Mezio), with the painting La notte.
In 1949 he was present in the great Twentieth Century Italian Art exhibition held at the MoMa in New York, including what the American curators consider the greatest Italian artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Between ’48 and ’49, Stradone, “a very consistent painter in deepening his own poetics, in evoking forms from material magma through the coagulation of light and its detachment from shadow, and very faithful to a theme of poor objects and countries, of ruins and human wrecks” , veers quite abruptly towards a “very personally neo-Cubist and satirical” modus, well represented by The Triumph of Bartali (1948), a monumental work where, together with the champions Bartali and Coppi, figures of great historical-political relevance, such as Pope Pius XII. Judged to be too bold and irreverent, the painting was sensationally rejected by the 1950 Venice Biennale. In 1954 he participated in the Biennale with several works.

At the beginning of the 1960s he participated in the retrospective dedicated to the Roman School from 1930 to 1945. In 1964, a monograph dedicated to Giovanni Stradone was published by Editore De Luca with a very rare introductory essay by Giorgio de Chirico. In 1967 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti included him in the large exhibition he curated in Florence: Modern Art in Italy from 1915 to 1935, while the following year he exhibited in a triple solo show, with Mafai and Scipione, at the Senior Gallery in Rome. An important retrospective of his was held in the same gallery in 1973, which retraced all the stages of his pictorial research. After an interruption in his exhibition activity that lasted a few years, in 1978 he held two solo shows, simultaneously at the La Barcaccia and Russo galleries in Rome. In ’79, issue 44 of the magazine “Carte Segrete” (April-June) is dedicated to an exhaustive critical anthology (1943-1979) by Giovanni Stradone, with texts by Cesare Brandi, Enrico Crispolti, Giorgio De Chirico, Ercole Maselli , Nello Ponente, Toti Scialoja, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Antonello Trombadori, Lorenza Trucchi, Marcello Venturoli and many others.