Autograph Card by Afro

Autograph Card Signed by Afro Basaldella to the Countess Anna Laetitia.Pecci-Blunt.

Rome, 1950's (1958-1959)  .    In 24°. In Italian. Excellent condition: As good as New. Original envelope included.

A Greeting autograph card in which the artist declines the theatre invitation of the Countess. 

Collect or present this unique piece of the Roman school artist, as if it was a holy relic!

Background

In the same period of this manuscript, Afro has a growing international success: he is invited to II. Documenta in Kassel, and was the winner of the prize in Pittsburgh and the prize for Italy at the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York. The Guggenheim bought his painting "Night Flight"(1957). In 1961 J. J. Sweeney, the curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, dedicated a splendid monograph to him.

Although his succes, Afro never forgot his patron of art, the Countess Anna Laetitia Pecci Blunt, best-known as "Mimì", that founded La Cometa Gallery in Rome in 1935(until 1938), together with the Italian poet Libero de Libero, and the support of Leonardo Sinisgalli and Corrado Cagli, an intimate Afro's friend. 

Discover More About The Countess Pecci-Blunt, Here!

Afro Basaldella  (Udine, 1912 – Zurich, 1976)

Afro Basaldella achieves a Painting degree in Venice in 1931. In 1928, along with his brothers Mirko and Dino as well as A. Filipponi, he shows his work at the Exhibition of the Friulian Avant-Garde and the year after at the XX Art Exposition Bevilacqua la Masa (Venice ). Still in 1929 he wins a scholarship from the Marangoni Arts Foundation giving him the opportunity to go to Rome where he meets Scipione, Mario Mafai, and Corrado Cagli.

In 1936 he engages in a series of murals for the Opera Nazionale Balilla youth organization in Udine (they were destroyed shortly after), one of the projects that portrays the architectural vocation of tonal painting.  In 1937, while in Paris, he collaborates with Cagli on the vast decorations for the World Exposition. He takes an interest to Impressionist and Cubist painting. In 1937 he does an important solo-exhibition at La Cometa Gallery in Rome.

In 1939 his work as a painter-decorator is shown in several Roman exhibitions dedicated to social and “local” themes: Maternity and Infancy, Textile, and Mineral. The works of art from the period 1940-’42 (still lifes, le Rovine and figure paintings) live in a more interior and evocative dimension, the tonal surfaces dissolve and shatter into a sort of Impressionism of the memory. From 1941 to the end of the war, Afro is in Venice where he teaches mosaic design at the Academy. Afro produces the cartoons for the mosaics in the reception hall for the E42. In his works of art after 1943 there seems to appear a tendency towards a linear and coloristic synthesis, in tune with the new Italian interest for the Cubist and Post-Cubist style. This research period was the prelude to his post-war production that would lead to the Informal.