Autoritratto nello studio. Gli ensembles milanesi di Felice Casorati tra 1921 e 1922

Abstract

This paper aims at reconstructing the origin of the allegorical meaning in the work of the Italian painter Felice Casorati, as it emerges in the ensembles sent to three Milanese exhibitions between 1921 and 1922. These exhibitions constitute a turning point of his career, when he is trying to position himself in the national panorama of modern art, putting off his participation to the Venice Biennale and establishing a new own public image. Casorati sets a new dialogue among his paintings and sculptures exhibited one next to the other, through a net of mise en abîme and quotations among the works themselves. The fascination for the studio work is indebted to Cézanne’s reception of the time and, on a visual level, to the use of photographs in Casorati’s practice. The image of the atelier, as both the shared background of his paintings and their ultimate subject, becomes a constant and refers more and more clearly to the artist’s work and to a self-reflection of painting upon itself.