Arnaldo Badodi

Arnaldo Badodi was born in Milan in March 1913 and died in Kamenskovo in 1943. In the Iannaccone collection, there are cabinets overflowing with out-of-fashion clothes, young women sitting and showcasing themselves, lost in thought over a glass of Campari; disillusioned and restless odalisques and acrobats on stage telling a timeless fairy tale, and small figures painted around a billiard table in the railway workers’ after-work gathering. Ordinary people that make this little world grand and who, according to the artist, are the only ones worthy of representation. In his bedroom, the confined space is described by the corner created by the bookshelf and the sofa, where a coat is accompanied by a series of hastily abandoned and disordered objects that, replacing the figure of a woman, give the painting a backdrop of slight unease. The overcoat seems animated, with that left sleeve hanging from the bed not following its outlines but remaining suspended. Its gaze, with that constant "photographic" framing, is a tender homage to the father, the "portraitist of the lens" for the gentry of old Milan; it is compassionate, benevolent, and, according to critic Marco Valsecchi, characterized by "a profoundly pathetic charlottian irony, made of that indistinct crossing between smile and pity that Charlot expressed in an unforgettable way in the famous dance of the rolls in The Gold Rush or in the final frames of The Circus, when the little man is alone on the endless road." The artist Piero Gauli remembered him "still proudly riding the 'Bianchi super luxury' [...] pedaling through Via Senato, Corso Venezia, Via Spiga, Via S. Andrea, as in a farewell parade that would lead him, feathers in the wind, in the uniform of the 3rd Bersaglieri, far away until he vanished into the dreadful, tragically white fade." He died lost in Russia, and he knew it. He recounts it in a painting jealously hidden on the back of a café and titled The Suicide of the Painter. According to Giuseppe Iannaccone, "in The Suicide, the artist hangs himself to put an end to his marginalization, while in the café, despite the multitude crowding the venue, each person seems to retreat into their own dimension, gazing into nothingness. I believe Badodi, being of a shy character, experienced this solitude firsthand: only through painting could he express what he felt, as seen in these two panels, which speak of the sad premonition of death that tormented him. The empty chair in the café clearly indicates an absence. But who is missing? Is it not the artist who hanged himself in the scene of The Suicide? It was precisely this intrigue, this double premonition, that convinced me never to separate the two paintings. Badodi wanted them together, and to divide them would have been like betraying him. And a few years later, the poor Badodi, barely thirty, truly died in war."