Ennio Morlotti

Ennio Morlotti was born in Lecco in September 1910 and died in Milan in December 1992. “I confess that I was surprised to hear talk of Van Gogh and German Expressionists. I instead aimed towards Cézanne and the Cubists; I aspired to them to cleanse myself of the impurities of pictorialism. […] More than an aversion to 'Corrente,' I expressed an internal dissent.” With these words, Morlotti retrospectively described his relationship with "Corrente," of which he participated only marginally, not taking part in either of the two exhibitions organized by the group in 1939, and only exhibiting in 1943 at the Bottega di Corrente alongside Treccani and Cassinari, by which time many of the initial stylistic references had changed.

In the still life featuring a bull's skull, part of the Iannaccone collection, the classic jug, a typical protagonist of 20th-century still lifes, is distorted beyond recognition, accompanied by a bull's skull, reminiscent of the “grandiose and grotesque Picassian mythology” encountered in Paris in ’37 and previously used by the artist Renato Guttuso. By rendering his objects unrecognizable and denying the composition any perspective reference, Morlotti demonstrates a preference for “a purely mental relationship between forms,” valuing their “symbolic significance.” Indeed, the bull's skull is the focal point of the painting, a grim metaphor for the daily violence of those years, permeated by a sense of death that ironically contrasts with its large, deep eye and the wide-open jaws that give it a sense of life.