Alberto Magnelli, born in Florence in 1888, was a self-taught painter who produced his first works in 1907, drawing inspiration from artists of the Trecento and Quattrocento periods. From 1911 onwards, he frequented Italian Futurists such as Carrà, Boccioni, and Severini.
During a trip to Paris, he met Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, and others. It was through these encounters and his trip to the French capital that his art took shape. Upon his return to Florence in 1915, he took the leap into abstraction.
From 1920 to 1930, a period when Europe was facing post-war problems, he returned to representing the real world, but without completely abandoning abstraction.
In 1931, Magnelli moved to Paris and produced the series of paintings entitled “Pierres éclatées” (Shattered Stones), which he began after visiting the marble quarries of Carrara in Italy. The artist was amazed by the beauty of these stones and produced around thirty drawings, marking his return to abstraction. In 1936, he found his style, which was linked to geometric abstraction (large areas of flat color, contrasting shapes, etc.).
During World War II, Magnelli took refuge in Grasse and met Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Sonia Delaunay.
In 1947, a first retrospective of his works was presented at the René Drouin gallery in Paris.
For Magnelli, painting was above all a question of architecture, in which abstraction was characterized by the maximum simplification of objects and forms: “His lines are articulated in an open, autonomous network and function not as contours, but as signs that counterpoint the impeccable assembly of colored areas.” Maurice Becter.
Magnelli was the first Italian artist to explore the world of non-figurative art. He died in 1971 in Meudon.