Mario Mafai e Antonietta Raphaël. Un’altra forma di amore

An artistic and affective adventure built on diversity, of languages, training and culture, but also on common ideas and passions, capable of transforming life into poetry. Fifty years after the death of Antonietta Raphaël and sixty years after that of Mario Mafai, the exhibition at the Casino dei Principi of Villa Torlonia proposes a new reflection on the two artists considered among the protagonists of the artistic events of the 20th century.

Antonietta Raphaël and Mario Mafai met exactly one hundred years ago, in 1925, in the Scuola Libera del Nudo in Rome that they both attended. After the brief and passionate season that saw them give life together with Scipione to the so-called “School of Via Cavour”, Mafai and Raphaël followed parallel but often divergent paths, strongly conditioned by historical reality. Mario quickly carved out an important role for himself in the Roman artistic environment, maintaining his prestige even after the war. The biographical and artistic story of Antonietta, a Lithuanian of Jewish origin, exposed to gender prejudice and forced to leave Rome during the years of racial laws and the war, was quite different. The discovery of her talent and the valorization of her work only came about from the 1950s onwards, with gradually increasing recognition of her role in the definition of an anti-nineteenth-century line, of her original sculptural work and of her last bright and happy painting season in the 1960s.

Conceived by the Centro Studi Mafai Raphaël and promoted by Roma Capitale, Assessorato alla Cultura - Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, with the organization and museum services of Zètema Progetto Cultura, the exhibition presents to the public over one hundred paintings and sculptures, some of which have never been seen before and others rarely exhibited. The works on display come from the collections of the Sovrintendenza Capitolina, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Florentine Civic Museums, the art collections of the Chamber of Deputies and the Bank of Italy, numerous private collections and the collections of the two artists’ heirs. Rare and selected original documentation consisting of letters, drawings and photographs helps to narrate the human and artistic life of Mafai and Raphaël.