Giuseppe SANTOMASO

Giuseppe Santomaso – Biography, Lithographs and Original Prints

Giuseppe Santomaso (Venice, 26 September 1907 – Venice, 23 May 1990) was one of the leading voices of Italian post-war abstraction. A founder of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti and later a member of the Gruppo degli Otto, he won the prize for Italian painting at the 1954 Venice Biennale and showed at the first three editions of documenta in Kassel. His canvases distil the walls, water and changing light of his native city into fields of colour and sign. A printmaker from the late 1930s onwards, he left a substantial body of original lithographs and etchings, many of them printed by the Erker-Presse in St Gallen.

Le Coin des Arts currently offers a small group of Santomaso original prints: an untitled lithograph of 1966; Rosso agli angoli (1971), an artist’s proof on Rives BFK with the Erker Presse blind stamp; Erker-Treffen 1 (1972) and Erker-Treffen 2 (1974), both signed and numbered from an edition of 200 published in St Gallen; and a late untitled etching and aquatint of 1989. Each sheet has been chosen for the quality of the impression, its edition, provenance and condition.

A goldsmith’s son in Venice: early years and Paris (1907-1945)

The son of Filippo Santomaso, a master goldsmith, he drew from childhood and was briefly taught by the painter Luigi Scarpa Croce. In 1926, aged eighteen, he first exhibited at Ca’ Pesaro in the young artists’ shows of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, where he met the critic Giuseppe Marchiori. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice from 1932 to 1934 and was already exhibiting at the 19th Venice Biennale in 1934. His first graphic works date from 1938; a year later he held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Rive Gauche in Paris. The still lifes of the early 1940s owe much to Braque and Cubism. After taking part in the Rome Quadriennale of 1943, he illustrated Paul Éluard’s Grand Air in 1945.

The Fronte Nuovo, the Group of Eight and the 1954 Biennale

In 1946 Santomaso signed the anti-fascist manifesto of the Nuova Secessione Artistica Italiana – soon renamed the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti – alongside Marchiori, Emilio Vedova, Renato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti and Armando Pizzinato. That same year Marchiori introduced him and Vedova to Peggy Guggenheim. When the group split between realists and abstractionists, Santomaso sided with abstraction, and in 1952 he was one of the Gruppo degli Otto, the eight painters championed by Lionello Venturi, together with Afro, Birolli, Antonio Corpora, Mattia Moreni, Morlotti, Giulio Turcato and Vedova. A regular at the Biennale from 1948 – when he received the prize of the City of Venice – he was awarded the first prize for Italian painting there in 1954.

London, Kassel and New York: international recognition

Britain discovered Santomaso early. In November 1953 he had a solo exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in London, introduced by Herbert Read; it would be more than six decades before his next solo show in the United Kingdom, Giuseppe Santomaso: Animated Painting, curated by Francesca Pola at the Cortesi Gallery in Mayfair in 2019. Meanwhile his painting moved towards the Informel, with thick surfaces, rapid signs and a Venetian palette of earths, greys and reds. He took part in documenta in 1955, 1959 and 1964, signed with the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York in 1956 and showed there for the first time in 1957, an encounter with American Abstract Expressionism that left its mark. Further honours followed – the Graziano Prize (1956), the Marzotto Prize (1958) – along with a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1960), the São Paulo Bienal (1961) and a retrospective that toured Hamburg, Berlin and Dortmund in 1965-66. For some twenty years he also taught painting at the Venice Academy.

St Gallen, Palladio and the late work (1964-1990)

Around 1964 printmaking reshaped his idea of pictorial space: he adapted the aquatint dust box (boîte à grains) to painting, letting pigment settle in fine, layered veils. His ties with the Galerie im Erker in St Gallen, which had shown him in 1960 and again in 1964, led to a long collaboration with its printing workshop. In the 1970s his compositions grew sparer, built from flat planes of colour; the Lettere a Palladio series of 1977 pays tribute to the architect. He exhibited at the Kraków print biennial (1972 and 1978), and in 1983 received the Feltrinelli Prize for painting from the Accademia dei Lincei. He died in Venice on 23 May 1990. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection holds Secret Life (1958) and Letter to Palladio No. 6 (1977).

Santomaso the printmaker: techniques, printers and catalogues

Santomaso worked in lithography and in intaglio – etching and aquatint. His most important printer and publisher was the Erker-Presse of St Gallen. It issued the small-format Erker-Treffen lithographs (around 38 × 28 cm, editions of 200), a series to which Piero Dorazio and Bernhard Heiliger also contributed, and An Angle (1972), a book of verse by Ezra Pound with seven lithographs and a record of the poet reading, published in 200 copies; the Museum of Modern Art owns a copy. Large lithographs of the early 1970s such as Rosso agli angoli are also in museum print rooms. There is, to our knowledge, no published catalogue raisonné devoted solely to the prints. The first general catalogue, Santomaso. Catalogue raisonné 1931-1974 (Venice, Alfieri, 1975), was followed by Nico Stringa’s Catalogo ragionato dell’opera pittorica (Turin, Allemandi, 2017), which covers the paintings. A print is therefore identified by title, date, technique, printer or publisher and edition; the catalogue of the 2007 centenary retrospective at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Giuseppe Santomaso e l’opzione astratta, includes a section on the graphic work.

Collecting Santomaso prints: a buyer’s guide

Edition. Erker lithographs are normally numbered – 200 for the Erker-Treffen sheets – while artist’s proofs are marked ‘E.A.’ or ‘P.A.’. Check that number and edition agree; see the printing.

Signature. Santomaso signed in pencil below the image. A signature in the stone or in a book’s colophon is not a hand signature.

Paper and blind stamp. Sheets printed in St Gallen often carry the ‘Erker Presse St Gallen’ blind stamp and are on fine wove paper such as Rives BFK – useful evidence of origin.

Documentation. In the absence of a print catalogue raisonné, ask for a full description and, for books, the copy number and whether a suite is included.

Pitfalls. Plates removed from An Angle should be sold as such; offset exhibition posters are reproductions, not original prints.

Condition. The saturated colours of the 1970s are light-sensitive: look for fading and choose conservation framing. Our guarantees are set out on the authenticity page.

Alongside Santomaso, the gallery selects prints by his fellow Erker-Treffen contributors Piero Dorazio and Bernhard Heiliger, and by Serge Poliakoff, Antoni Tàpies and Hans Hartung. See also lyrical abstraction and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Santomaso. Catalogue raisonné 1931-1974, introductory texts by Nello Ponente et al., Venice, Alfieri, 1975 · Nico Stringa (ed.), Giuseppe Santomaso. Catalogo ragionato dell’opera pittorica, Turin, Allemandi, 2017 · Francesca Pola (ed.), Giuseppe Santomaso: Animated Painting, London, Cortesi Gallery / Skira, 2019 · Peggy Guggenheim Collection – Giuseppe Santomaso · MoMA – Ezra Pound, An Angle (1972) · Swiss National Library – An Angle, Erker-Presse · Fondazione Giorgio Cini – Santomaso e l’opzione astratta · Store norske leksikon – Giuseppe Santomaso