"Portrait"- drawing in charcoal on paper by Lorenzo Viani

"Portrait" - drawing in charcoal on paper by Lorenzo Viani (1882-1936), years 1910/1920 Anarchist, rebellious, always on the side of the poor and the 'derelict' who made the protagonists of his most powerful paintings: Lorenzo Viani was one of the most interesting Tuscan artists of the twentieth century. Viani grew up in the neighborhood of the Darsena di Viareggio where he experienced poverty and misery firsthand. This experience lived during his adolescence after his father waiter in the Bourbon House was fired will mark him forever to the point that he declared in a letter: "I have always had a great terror of death, around my figures this death would not always breathe ? I believe so, I believe that all my visions of art pass through this damp passage of my brain and take on its color and intonation ". He studied first at the Academy of Lucca, then at that of Florence. In 1908 he went to Paris where he was able to see the Impressionists' works and also met Picasso. Back in Viareggio, he fought in anarcho-socialist circles in Versilia and devoted himself to painting in a room in the customs building. Expressionism, a taste for primitives, symbolism, nabis, the main trends of European painting of the period come together in Viani's art. His paintings are dark, ruthless, desperate, they show a humanity in disarray but which possesses a personal epic, a strength that redeems them from the condition of poverty in which they live. They are survivors of war, poverty and this makes them 'heroic'. Viani was an extraordinary example of the cultural and intellectual flowering that characterized Versilia, Lucchesia and Lunigiana at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A period that saw, over fifty years, the presence in Tuscany of personalities such as Puccini, Catalani, D'Annunzio, Ungaretti, Malaparte, Pea, Repaci, Cancogni, Montale, Carducci, Pascoli, Carrà and many others.