Armando Pizzinato

Armando Pizzinato was born in 1910 in Maniago. After his father’s suicide, he spent his childhood and early youth in Pordenone; later on he started commuting to the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, attending Virgilio Guidi’s courses until 1934. His artistic debut was in the Galleria del Milione in Milan, the center of the artistic avant-garde, where he met Cagli, Guttuso, Afro and Deluigi. Thanks to a scholarship, in 1936 he moved to Rome, where his friendship with De Felice and Guttuso was consolidated.

His youth works were influenced by the French Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne. After the censorship of French art by the fascist regime, Pizzinato dedicated his art to still life painting. At the outbreak of the war he moved to Venice. Here, in 1941, he held his first solo exhibition. The Venetian cultural environment, full of ideas and clandestine rebellions against fascism, involved and excited him.

During one of his fervent encounters with other artists and intellectuals (including Emilio Vedova, Carlo Scarpa, Alberto Viani), he met his first wife, Zaira. He stopped his artistic activity until the end of the war and the liberation of Venice. From then on, his artistic commitment was inextricably linked to his political and civil one.

Together with Vedova he received a great public and critics acknowledgement for his exhibition Tempere Partigiane of 1946, where he was noticed by Giuseppe Marchiori and Renato Birolli. The Venetian cultural climate made possible, in the same year, the first formulation of the New Italian Artistic Secession, in opposition to the twentieth century and shortly after the formulation of the Front of the New Arts, by Marchiori, of which Pizzinato immediately became one of the leading exponents, also participating in the 1948 Biennale. These were years in which the artist was exhibiting all over the world, also promoted by Peggy Guggenheim’s lively interest in his work.

After this totally abstract parenthesis, he abandoned geometry full of chromatic and stylistic novelties, and inside the incessant political activity, he brought his art to a new territory, in an increasingly close comparison with Guttuso and the cultural policy of the PCI. In the 1950s and in the middle of the following decade, it radically adhered to social realism, with greater references to the figurative rather than to the constructivist past.

Following personal events, including the death of his wife Zaira in 1963 in the late 1960s, his painting technique underwent another radical change. He returned to a greater abstraction and faced a lyrical dimension with more emotional and less objective tones. He put aside the red (symbol of the fights) preferring the blues, greens and purples, in a lyricism more than ever close to the inner bond with nature.

He died in 2004 in Venice.

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