LUIGI RUSSOLO
(Portogruaro, 1885 - Cerro di Laveno, 1947)
The Snow, 1945
Oil on panel, 50x60 cm
Signed and dated lower left Russolo/1945
On the back, autograph signature and title Russolo/ “La neve”
Exhibitions: Galleria Salvetti, Milan, 1946
Born in Portogruaro in 1885 and died in Cerro, a hamlet of Laveno-Mombello, in 1947, his figure as a painter, musician, and inventor remains among the protagonists of Futurism, and the debt that all 20th-century music owes to his intuition of a new sound world in which noise becomes music has not yet been fully acknowledged.
Having settled in Milan in 1901, he attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, participating during that period in the restoration of Leonardo's Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie.
His manifestos and the volume "The Art of Noises", coupled with the invention of the "Intonarumori", instruments capable of generating a noise modulated in pitch, foreshadow the entire experience of Musique Concrète and electronic music. Russolo also invented the enharmonic bow and the enharmonic piano, but above all the rumonarmonico, which brought together various intonarumori, piloted by keyboards and pedals similar to harmoniums. All these instruments were used in 1927 for the performances of the Futurist pantomime at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in Paris. The score of Risveglio di una città (Awakening of a City) (a composition defined as a "noise spiral" by the author) has been lost.
In the last years of his life, he devoted himself to metapsychic experiments and published the volume Beyond Matter (Milan 1938, Brocca). He resumed painting in 1941-42, in a vaguely naif style that he himself defined as "modern classic".
