1941

1941

Cassinari prepared his first personal exhibition at the Bottega degli Artisti di Corrente gallery and exhibited fifteen oil paintings, which Elio Vittorini described in the catalogue with the following words: “…mystical devotion. And he gets it from his blood, together with his need to rummage and dig in the world in order to tear cries of colour from it. None of the modern young painters has ever been so determined about the need to get such deepness from the colour, from nothing but the colour…The last Cassinari’s landscapes already belong to the contemporary Italian history of art …A sort of grace has perforated his hands…”. In autumn he took part in the Premio Bergamo event and won £ 2500 for the portrait of Rosa Birolli, even known as Ritratto di Rosetta (Rosetta’s portrait); this painting marked a turning point towards less bright tones and a more precise drawing, as Guttuso underlined in his work Mestiere di Pittore in 1972.