by Valentina Biondini, art and literature amateur
Marisa Mori, born Maria Luisa Lurini, is an Italian painter who was self-taught, but soon art becomes her reason for living. Primarily a painter and an exponent of diverse artistic movements, she moved from the Turin school of Casorati to Futurism, eventually broadening her interests to photography and theater design.
Born in Florence in 1900, she moved to Turin with her family at the end of World War I. Her artistic calling was evident from a young age, so much so that she began taking painting lessons, though her parents weren’t particularly enthusiastic. In 1920, she married Mario Mori, her first cousin, a mining technician, agronomist, and surveyor employed by the Argentine government and therefore frequently abroad. Consequently, after the birth of their son Franco, their separation came abruptly.
Painting then became her main occupation: she constantly painted various still lifes and portraits, including her young son. Her deepest desire was to join Felice Casorati’s school, which she did in 1925. The style of her works from this period (1925-1931) is very close to that of the master, both in terms of subject matter and in the formal and chromatic choices that Mori interpreted with delicate and sensitive solutions: a melancholic languor pervades both her family portraits and her desolate seascapes, painted in a luminous, calcified, and slightly wrinkled material.
Having abandoned Casorati’s style, in the 1930s Mori enthusiastically embraced Futurism and began a very intense exhibition schedule. In 1933, she was invited to the First National Futurist Exhibition in Rome and won third place in the Golfo di La Spezia painting prize with the triptych titled Sintesi del golfo. Although none of the Futurist artists can be considered a forerunner of feminism, Mori stands out for her determination to assert the feminine connotation of her art. In the volume La cucina futurista (1932), written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillia, she decided, for example, to contribute with the recipe, and the related drawing, of the unprejudiced and sensual “Italian breasts in the sun,” one of the most famous recipes of Futurist cuisine. Meanwhile, in 1936, she created a painting with the emblematic title “Ebbrezza fisica della maternità“, which can be read as a vindication of the carnal dimension of women, otherwise relegated by regime propaganda to the stereotype of the angel of the hearth.
However, in the late 1930s, after the enactment of the Racial Laws, she questioned her relationship with Futurism and began her gradual separation from the Futurist groups. She also sheltered the famous Rita Levi Montalcini and her family, as a friend of Rita’s twin sister Paola, who had also been a student of Felice Casorati. Leaving the movement pushed her to return to classical figuration, rediscovering Casorati’s themes and methods, such as portraiture, still lifes, masks, and nudes. She also taught History of Costume at the Accademia dei Fidenti in Florence, a drama school she had previously attended as an actress, and resumed her studies by taking Arturo Cecchi’s courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. From the 1950s onwards, she led a reclusive life, with rare exhibitions of her later work, returning to painting still lifes, nudes, and portraits, in solitude, until her death in Florence in 1985.
Her oblivion was broken in 1980 when two of her paintings were included in the exhibition “L’altra metà dell’avanguardia” at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, the first major exhibition dedicated to women in Futurism. A curiosity: in the 1930s Mori became a recognized aeropainter. A necessary step, in expressing the emotion of flight in her paintings, was her initiation to flight, an experience she described as follows: “So here I was, ready to fly in this little machine that showed me in daring twists and turns the entire landscape upside down. I was strapped to the seat and those acrobatics, that unusual vision of the earth, inspired me to work, and I became an aeropainter.” By virtue of this, in 1932 she participated in the exhibition on Futurist aeropainters in Paris, where she had the honor of meeting Picasso.
But to explore the rich and complex interiority of this great artist, there is no better way than to interview her directly. Let’s visit her in her large house in Florence where, intent on painting, she awaits us…“In my time, people were amazed at how I had moved from Casorati’s Turin school to Marinetti’s Futurism. Indeed, they were very different environments, as were their mentors: Casorati was composed and graphic, Marinetti volcanic and kaleidoscopic. However, both, in my opinion, shared the same androcentric approach to art… Despite Casorati’s disappointment, Futurism seemed to perfectly respond to my need for freedom and dynamism, which had remained too long trapped in the rigor of his Turin school. So yes, I can say that Futurism was a joy for me, because I could invent, enrich with color and rhythm what I had previously studied in real life! In other words this transition, which from the outside might seem absurd, occurred out of pure necessity, the need to find a new form of expression.
However, when during the Second World War the racial laws were promulgated, I could not remain indifferent. I never belonged to any political party, I was neither fascist nor anti-fascist, but when racial persecution struck I took a stand by hosting Jews, the Levi-Montalcini brothers: the painters Paola and Gino, and the future Nobel Prize winner Rita. That moral fracture became, once again out of necessity, also artistic. No longer recognizing myself in the movement, I returned to the subjects and landscapes of my early period. And I decided to produce my paintings here in Florence, in the quiet of this house, exhibiting my works only rarely: still lifes with roses and gardens, masks, vases filled with flowers, and various portraits of women of all ages. Women, in some cases, with a pensive and melancholic expression, the expression of those who have not remained indifferent to the storms of life and bear the marks in their gaze and face, just like me.”
Thank you, Marisa…