ANTON GIULIO AND ARTURO BRAGAGLIA | PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN

Collection of Anton Giulio Bragaglia

By descent to Antonella Bragaglia, the photographer's daughter

By descent through the family 

After their official dismissal from the Futurists in 1913, Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia began another rich period of productivity. Although they continued their experimentations with photodynamism, a shift to other media, including cinema, was natural: their father had previously given each of his sons assistantships at Cines, the production studio he managed, and film was an exciting and fresh means of expression. In 1916 and 1917, Anton Giulio made two films, Thaïs and Perfido Incanto, both with sets designed by Enrico Prampolini, who had also been ousted from the Futurist movement.  While Anton Giulio explored film and opened an art gallery in 1918, Arturo continued working as a studio photographer, making stylized portraits of artists and those associated with the Italian film industry, and his portraits were permanently on display in Anton Giulio’s gallery.   

The photographs in the present lot exemplify the brothers’ continuous appetite for experimentation throughout their career. The haunting, dark image of a woman’s face emerging from an inky background features extensive pencil drawings on the reverse, with outlines of the cheek, chin, pupils, hairline, and accentuated eyelashes. It is likely that this drawing was photographed and its negative was used to create a new image altogether, complete with an angular design in the negative space below the floating female head. This negative image also features printing guide marks, the photographer’s signature, and the inscription ‘Roma,’ indicating it too may have been intended to be used for printing. Although similar composites of other subjects are held by the Bragaglia Archive, no other such images have appeared at auction. 

While the identity of the present sitter is unknown, she bears resemblance to two actresses the Bragaglias knew and worked with at the time, including Thaïs Galizky, star of the film Thaïs and Lyda Borelli, the diva featured in Perfido Incanto. There are only a handful of Bragaglia images from the 1910s that feature women, including The Rose (sold in these rooms, 3 October 2018) and The Typist (1911), now in the Gilman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2005.100.244).