Antonietta Raphael

Biography

Antonietta Raphael’s diploma was in music: she graduated in piano from the Royal Academy of Music in London and taught solfège in the East End. She would become a sculptor and painter later.

She was born in Kaunas in 1895 (by some accounts on 29 July), the daughter of a rabbi, Simon Raphael; her mother was called Katia Horowitz. After her father’s death she and her mother moved to London. There she went to the British Museum; by some accounts she knew the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Ossip Zadkine, but this is hard to verify. When her mother died in 1919, Raphael left for Paris, and in 1924 she moved to Rome.

In 1925 she enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti, met the painter Mario Mafai there, and they began living together. They had three daughters: Miriam (1926), later a journalist and writer; Simona (1928), who became a senator and a writer; and Giulia (1930), a set and costume designer.

From 1927 the apartment on Via Cavour was a place where the poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Leonardo Sinisgalli gathered, along with young artists such as Scipione, Renato Marino Mazzacurati and Corrado Cagli. The Scuola Romana (Roman School), also known as the Via Cavour School, traces its beginnings to it; Mafai and Raphael are named as its founders. In the Roman circle she brought, as critics put it, a note of unconventional internationalism. In those years she painted portraits and landscapes with simplified forms and distorted composition, something between naïve art and the dreamlike fantasies of Chagall.

Raphael first exhibited in 1929, at the First Sindacale (the regional trade-union art exhibition) of Lazio, where the art historian Roberto Longhi singled her out. In 1930 she went to Paris with her husband and there began to work in sculpture, leaving painting in second place. In 1932 she met Epstein in London, after which she settled in Rome for good. She worked on “Escape from Sodom” for about a year in the studio of the sculptor Ettore Colla, whose guest she was. In 1936–1938 she took part in the Sindacale exhibitions. In her sculpture of this period there is no sign of the influence of Italian sculpture of the day, but there are clear references to Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. From 1932 her sculptures took on a vigorous naturalistic character, with symbolic and monumental accents that recall the art of the East.

When the racial laws were introduced in Italy, she left for Genoa with her husband and daughters. The family was sheltered and supported by the collector Emilio Jesi and the philanthropist Alberto Della Ragione. In 1943–1945 Raphael lived in Rome with her daughter Giulia, then returned to Genoa and worked alongside a group of sculptors that included Edoardo Alfieri, Agenore Fabbri, Lorenzo Garaventa and Luigi Navone. In Genoa, critics say, she developed her link with the archaic.

In 1948, after a hard period of poverty, she took part in the Venice Biennale. From 1952 critics began to take her work seriously, and a large retrospective was held at the Galleria dello Zodiaco in Rome. In 1956 she won a purchase prize at the fourth Premio Spoleto and travelled to China, where she exhibited in Beijing with Aligi Sassu, Agenore Fabbri, Giulio Turcato and others. Group exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the Americas followed. At the 8th Rome Quadriennale of 1959–1960, devoted to the Scuola Romana, many of her works were shown, and this secured her place among the main figures of the school. By then she was working almost entirely in sculpture. Her stone pieces, such as “Miriam dormiente” (Sleeping Miriam), “The Three Sisters” and “Nemesis”, are described by critics as showing the tender, lively carnality of stone.

Raphael died in Rome on 5 September 1975. Her works are held at the Museo Novecento in Florence, the Bilotti Open Air Museum in Cosenza, the Palazzo Ricci in Macerata and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin.