Enrico Prampolini

Enrico Prampolini was an Italian futurist painter and sculptor. He assisted in the design of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution and was active in aeropainting. Prampolini pursued a program of abstract and quasi-abstract painting, combined with a career in stage design, after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Roma. There, he came into conflict with his teachers because of his Futurist views. Prampolini also spent several years in Paris and had close contacts with the representatives of the European avant-garde art, and with the Section d’Or, Dadaism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, the Abstraction-Création group, with Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jean Cocteau. The film Thaïs, shot in 1918 under Antonio Giulio Bragaglia, with Prampolini’s stage sets, is considered the only surviving futuristic film.

Prampolini occupied a place of his own in European abstract art, characterized by his deep concern for dynamism and organicism, which manifested himself in the cosmic visions and dreams of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1927 he founded the Futurist Theatre Prampolini. One year later he conceived the Futurist Pavilion at the Esposizione del Valentino in Turin. After the futurist experiences, he produced different materials and works, sometimes influenced by the visions of the microcosm. After World War II, he devoted himself to informal painting.

The painting Angeli della terra from 1936 is listed with different subtitles like Giocatori di Calcio (Football Players) and I miti dell’azione (Myths of Action), respectively. The work in oil on panel (90 x 117 cm) is in the Galleria Arte Centro in Milan. Trasfigurazione dell’Atleta could not be identified. However, there is a 1934 painting by Prampolini titled I funerali del romanticismo: trasfigurazione estetica (The funeral of romanticism: aesthetic transfiguration) (wood on chipboard, 117 x 89.5 cm) in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto. Possibly the title was here adapted to the event.