Achille Funi

A comprehensive monograph, the culmination of many years of in-depth research, it puts to good use an impressive body of documents as well as writings and testimony by the artist himself.

Sculptor, architect, illustrator, set designer and graphic designer, Achille Funi was one of the leading figures in Italian painting in the early part of the 20th century, joining Margherita Sarfatti’s Novecento movement. In addition to his traditional easel works, he devoted himself passionately to mural painting, an ancient and glorious technique that fell into disuse in modernity but was brought back into vogue during the 1930s and 1940s, in the wake of Sironi’s enthralling example. To be counted among the most influential figures on the Italian art scene: a prominent intellectual, an authoritative voice in the cultural debate, Funi in 1939 became a lecturer at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, a position in which “Funi’s ability to form different personalities, and not replicas of himself […] a sign of his effectiveness as a master emerges.”

Suffice it to mention that not only the figurative Adami and Mariani were his pupils, but kinetic artists belonging to Group T (Grazia Varisco, Boriani, Anceschi, Gianni Colombo) and signers of the Spatialist manifesto such as Crippa, Dova and Peverelli. The volume is part of the Scheiwiller series, L’arte e le arti, in the series in collaboration with the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

BY
Elena Pontiggia – Critic and art historian, lecturer at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and the Milan Polytechnic, contributor to several art magazines and the Turin Press.