Antonietta Raphaël

Antonietta De Simon Raphaël (Kaunas, 1895 – Rome, 1975) was a Lithuanian-born artist and a key figure in the Roman Expressionist movement between the two World Wars. Trained between Eastern Europe and Paris, she brought to Rome a language informed by contemporary French developments, which she reworked into a highly personal synthesis of tradition and modernity. After moving to the Italian capital at the end of 1927 with Mario Mafai, she contributed to the emergence of what Roberto Longhi would later define as the “Scuola di via Cavour,” distinguishing herself through a painting style described as “eccentric and anarchic,” free from academic constraints and driven by a strong expressive tension. Her works, often devoted to urban views and Roman landscapes, convey an intense and anti-rhetorical vision of the city, where architecture and nature intertwine in an unstable yet poetic balance. Among the works from this period, View from the Terrace on Via Cavour stands out, where the profile of the Colosseum and the trees of the Palatine emerge among compressed buildings marked by dark outlines, within a flattened spatial structure devoid of perspectival depth. In works such as Arch of Septimius Severus, the monument is rendered in an almost two-dimensional form, stripped of its grandeur and transformed into a fragile, suspended presence immersed in a vividly colored landscape. In Still Life with Guitar, everyday objects—musical instruments, playing cards, and drapery—combine in a dense and narrative composition, where each element contributes to constructing an intimate and vibrant visual story. Through a deliberately naïve gaze, unmediated by academic tradition, Raphaël reinterprets Rome with a deeply personal sensibility, built upon bold chromatic fields, marked contours, and compressed spatiality. Her position as a foreign artist allowed her to observe the city with a visual and poetic freedom that was largely absent from the Italian academic tradition, contributing significantly to the renewal of pictorial language at the time. In 1931, she temporarily moved to London, where she engaged with more complex subjects, as seen in her painting dedicated to Yom Kippur, in which a multitude of figures gathered in prayer creates an intense, collective scene marked by profound emotional participation. Her work today stands as one of the most original expressions of Italian Expressionism in the twentieth century. Also part of the Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection are The Road to the Sea (1939) and Self-Portrait Writing a Letter to Mario (1942). The latter testifies to her deep bond with Mario Mafai, evoking their epistolary exchange during the period of his military service. The self-portrait, composed of multiple canvases sewn together—according to a practice often linked to the scarcity of materials—captures an intimate and necessary gesture: the portraits that the two exchanged across distance became a way of preserving each other’s presence, transforming separation into a visual and emotional dialogue.