The Italian painter Anton Atanasio Soldati was born in Parma in 1896. In the 1930s, he became one of the central figures of Italian abstraction. As a young man, he trained as an architect in Parma in the 1920s. In 1925, he moved to Milan, where he met the abstractionists Mario Radice and Mauro...

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  Biography of Anatasio Soldati

  The Italian painter Anton Atanasio Soldati was born in Parma in 1896. In the 1930s, he became one of the central figures of Italian abstraction. As a young man, he trained as an architect in Parma in the 1920s. In 1925, he moved to Milan, where he met the abstractionists Mario Radice and Mauro Reggiani, who will influence his production until then linked to purism.
  In 1931, the Milan gallery Il Milione organized a solo exhibition of the artist. He exhibited there again the following year with Bogliardi and Ghiringhelli. It was while attending this famous gallery that he met Fernand Léger. The latter confronted him with cubism and allowed him to develop a language based on geometric forms, bright and unshaded colors, characterized by exact limits.
  For Atanasio Soldati, abstract painting is the liberation of figuration; lines and colors express drama and feeling on the same level without any kind of superstructure. Soldati's painting recognizes its human and dramatic substance as an intrinsic foundation.
  In his production of the mid-1930s, influenced by Paul Klee and Kandinsky, he introduced a new lyricism. He then followed a steady process of simplifying the image. In 1935, he joined the Abstraction-Création association in Paris.Between 1943 and 1945, he was forced to stop his painting activity to actively participate in the Resistance. In the following years, he obtained a teaching position at the Brera Academy in Milan. He developed a language close to neo-metaphysics, from which he quickly detached himself, finding his own expressive autonomy in this post-war period, consolidating his own poetics ideally close to Osvaldo Licini and Fausto Melotti.In 1948, Atanasio Soldati was one of the founders of the M.A.C. (Movimento Arte Concreta), together with Bruno Munari, Gillo Dorfles and Gianni Monnet. His works are very close to those of Alberto Magnelli and Auguste Herbin. This movement is seen as a new non-figurative language that does not impose formal constraints and opens itself to various possibilities while respecting the independence of the visual element from any objectivity.In the last years of his work, there is a cooling of his color palette and a simplification of formal elements, with compositions with overlapping inlays.Atanasio Soldati - like Alberto Magnelli, Enrico Prampolini and Mauro Reggiani - can be considered the pioneer of abstract art in Italy. During his career, he was invited to exhibit at many prestigious events such as the 1936 Rome Quadrennial of Art and the post-war Venice Biennials of Art (1948, 1950, 1952).  His works, many of which were destroyed during the war, are kept in the modern art galleries of Rome and Milan.The artist died in Parma in 1953, he was 57 years old.
  
  

  

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