Mario Sironi

Galleria Milano, Milan
Galleria Rotta, Genoa
Galleria Barbaroux, Milan
Costantino Marino, Naples
Acquired from the above by the previous owner in the early 1970s

Athens, Zappeion Palace, Settimana Italiana in Atene, 1931
Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, Arte Moderna in Italia 1915-1935, 1967, no. 1392 (as dating from circa 1932)

Giovanni Scheiwiller, Mario Sironi, Milan, 1930, illustrated p. 57 (as dating from 1927)

Having adopted the style of the Italian Futurists, with whom he first exhibited in 1914, by the early 1920s Sironi began to break away from the Futurist artists and their fascination with depicting movement or machines. Instead, he embraced themes of deliberate timelessness, imagery of both rural and industrial worlds, that were much more encompassing than the more literal depictions of the Futurists. Turning away from the abstract aesthetic of the pre-war period, throughout the 1920s Sironi focused on depicting the peasant and working class environment, producing a number of paintings of field workers and empty city streets. In his depictions of men and women in a rural setting the artist seems less interested in recording their daily activities, and more in depicting them as types, populating his compositions with figures including farmers, fishermen and peasant families.

Contadini is a beautiful example of the stylistic shift in Sironi's work of the 1920s, treating the figures with a solidity, monumentality and a sense of volume comparable to Picasso's neo-classical style of this period. As Emily Braun observed about stylistic changes in Sironi's art of the time: 'He attempted to eradicate regional and class differences by culling models from the art of the nation's collective history. In particular, he praised those artistic epochs which employed arbitrary stylistic conventions and expressive distortions. Thus he preferred the Etruscan to the Roman and the Romanesque to the Renaissance, seeing them as vernacular and hence more genuinely 'popular' styles' (E. Braun, in Italian Art in the 20^th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900-1988 (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1989, p. 179).