Alfredo Volpi

Biography

In 1953, at the second São Paulo Art Biennial, the prize for the best Brazilian painter was shared by two men: Alfredo Volpi and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti. Di Cavalcanti publicly dismissed his colleague’s art as that of a “flag painter”. Volpi was already fifty-seven, and it was those flags that soon brought him his greatest fame.

He was born on 14 April 1896 in Lucca. He was not yet two years old when his parents moved to Brazil and settled in Cambuci, the district of São Paulo where Italian immigrants lived. He became a Brazilian citizen and spent almost his whole life in that city.

He had no teachers. He painted his first naturalist picture, by some accounts, in 1914; by others he began with decorative wall paintings as early as 1911. Later he worked as a decorative painter, painting walls and panels in the houses of well-to-do residents of São Paulo together with a Spanish painter and sculptor, Antonio Ponce Paz, who became a close friend. His early canvases recall the Expressionists; he was influenced by Ernesto de Fiori. A typical example of this period is the landscape “Mogi das Cruzes” (1939), painted for a patron. In the 1930s Volpi found himself among the artists who formed the Grupo Santa Helena, which included Francisco Rebolo, Clóvis Graciano, Mario Zanini, Fulvio Pennacchi and others. According to some accounts he was not an official member of the group, but often visited his friends Zanini and Rebolo at their studio on Praça da Sé. He held his first one-man exhibition at the Itá Gallery in São Paulo in 1944; the sources differ, and by other accounts he had exhibited earlier, at the Salão de Maio and at the first exhibition of the Família Artística Paulista in 1938. Gradually he moved from oil to tempera and to geometric abstract forms. In this choice one can see a knowledge of the Italian Renaissance painters, who worked in tempera. Then came the façades of houses, brightly coloured and highly stylized; critics later called them the “historical façades”. The theme lasted throughout the 1950s, after a brief “Concretist” period, although Volpi himself never acknowledged being part of the Concretist movement. Among the works of these years are “Night Façade” (1955) and a panel for the church of Cristo Operário (1951).

In the 1960s the “bandeirinhas”, small flags, took shape. Their source is the folk festival of festa junina, held every June across Brazil, when streets are hung with such flags. The motif itself is simple, and his attention is on colour combinations and balanced composition. Abstract geometry also grew out of this series, and his late fame is tied to it.

Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo (2006) and in Curitiba (2007) showed that Volpi was far from the isolated self-taught painter he was long thought to be. He absorbed a range of influences, among them Josef Albers. To my mind this is a significant correction to the usual picture of the untutored artist.

Among his later commissions for public buildings are the frescoes for the Chapel of Our Lady of Fátima (1958) and the frescoes for the Palácio dos Arcos in Brasília (1966).

On 15 April 1976, marking his eightieth birthday, the government of the State of São Paulo awarded him the Order of Ipiranga, in the grade of Grand Officer. Alfredo Volpi died in São Paulo on 28 May 1988.