Emilio Vedova

Emilio Vedova was born in Venice on August 9, 1919, into a family of artisans and workers, where he passed away in 2006. He began working at a young age to support himself while dedicating time to drawing and painting. In 1936, his uncle Alfredo Mancini hosted him in Rome for a year, where he drew landscapes of ruins, perspectives, and numerous self-portraits. In 1937, after returning to Venice, he decided to move to Florence with his South Tyrolean partner, Hermann Pircher, where they both attended a free school of nudes but spent much time “on the streets,” coming into contact with anti-fascist circles.

After some time, he returned to Venice, where the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation granted him a studio-attic at Palazzo Carminati. In 1940, he exhibited at Galleria Ongania in Venice. In 1942, he participated in what would turn out to be the last Bergamo Prize, exhibiting three works, including Caffeuccio veneziano, which is in the Iannaccone collection. This work is rooted in the futurism of Boccioni and the works of Tintoretto, which he undoubtedly admired in his hometown. The lines are sharp, with violent colors in deep, intense hues such as black and blue. Among the figures around the table, one person smokes a cigarette while waiting for something to happen. The canvas also conveys a sense of loneliness, depicted by a figure sitting alone at a table in the background, hands clasped as if praying to God to save them from the horrors of war.

In 1952, Raffaele De Grada wrote in a pamphlet published by Edizione del Milione titled Il movimento di Corrente: “A young man with a thick beard arrived from Venice. He seemed to have stepped out of the pages of a nineteenth-century novel, with the tender heart of the anarchists in those stories. Vedova found the most burning words for our manifesto of 1943: he twirled his beard at every sound that echoed like a bomb explosion. He had brought from Venice some expressionist drawings, climactic in nature. The squared fury of the forms gradually pacified into cubist black and white. A flash of the season, a storm of ’43, the ferment of the group; Emilio Vedova, a Venetian, did not surpass with the others the Cape of Good Hope of 1946. His agitation proved fertile in peak moments. Vedova then stagnated in the waters of cubism. Since '1943', he has been in Corrente. From afar, he had followed us. Perhaps from afar, he still follows us.”