The fruitful relationship between the Marche and Dalmatia continues, with many great artists who have worked in both regions, such as the Laurana, the Crivelli, Giorgio Orsini. Giovanni Dalmata. The first event, after the reopening of the Civic Museum of Macerata, in Palazzo Buonaccorsi, is an exhibition dedicated to the Dalmatian painter Tullio Crali, buried in the Marche city where he lived with his family.

The exhibition (7 May-30 August 2021) includes about forty works and follows the one held in London in 2020 at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italiana Art, a museum dedicated exclusively to modern Italian art. The curator of both exhibitions is Barbara Martorelli, together with Christopher Adams and the Associazione FuturCrali.

Crali, born in 1910 in Igalo, near Castelnuovo, at the mouth of the Bay of Kotor, died in Milan in 2000. His family had moved to Zadar after the First World War, like many Dalmatians, following Dalmatia's annexation to the new Yugoslav state. In Zadar, he had his first, decisive encounter with an airplane, a seaplane that landed right in front of his house. The artist recalls : " In my aeropaintings, there is always that marine horizon that I took with me as a boy when I left Zadar drowning in nostalgia."

In 1922 he moved with his family to Gorizia and in 1925 he had his first encounter with Futurism and wrote to Marinetti “to welcome him into the Futurist struggle”. Thanks to Sofronio Pocarini he entered the Julian Futurist Movement and continued his affirmation as a protagonist of Futurism and Aeropainting in particular. Gorizia, in the XNUMXs, was an artistically very lively city, thanks to the intertwining of various cultures, Italian, Slovenian, Jewish, German. Another Dalmatian, from Sebenico, had also arrived in Gorizia, Raul Cenisi, of a Slovenian father and a Sebenico mother, with whom Crali struck up a friendship.

The Julian air painting gained momentum in those years with the birth of Sisa (Italian Air Services Company) and the construction of seaplanes in the Trieste and Monfalcone shipyards. The Cosulich brothers, from Lussignana, shipowners and owners of the Trieste shipyard, played a leading role, with the concession of the first regular civil aviation service from Turin to Trieste. The inaugural flight of the Turin-Trieste line took place on 1 April 1926, in the presence of Mussolini, at the Pavia seaplane base, designed by the architect Giuseppe Pagano Pogatchnig from Parentio. The service was soon extended to Zara and followed by the Zara-Ancona route.

Crali, who had made the first flight in 1928, had soon realized that the construction of a new expressive mythology for which the language of early Futurism started from the lines-force, from the innovative formal syntheses and from syntax, had to be integrated with solutions aimed at the rendering of an unprecedented and astonishing vision from above. In 1929 the Manifesto of Aeropainting was published, a pictorial declination of Futurism, as an expression of the motion of the machine and of modernity.

Great was the enthusiasm for flight, the dynamism and speed of the airplane proclaimed by the manifesto, which the young Crali immediately adhered to, remaining a futurist and aeropainter until the end. He was eighty years old when he dedicated a suggestive series of works to the Frecce Tricolori.

Eufemia Juliana Budicin

 

Source: National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia