Pompeo Borra

Portrait with Hat - Lithograph by Pompeo Borra - 1950s

1950s

Pompeo Borra is an Italian painter born in Milan in 1898. He began his artistic career attending the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. In 1916, he took part as a volunteer in the First World War. At the end of the conflict, he returned to his vocation for painting. In 1924, he took part in the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte, Venice. In the same year, he met the group of founding artists of the Novecento movement and began to take part in the exhibitions. His paintings arouse the interest of Franz Roh, the famous theorist of magical realism and German New Objectivity, who invited him to the Italian art exhibition at the Kunstverein in Leipzig in 1928. His painting of severe purism proposes square images and compact volumes that evoke fourteenth-century painting, blocked and silent situations inhabited by everyday objects and dreamy and immobile characters, mostly female. In this decade he collaborated with Galleria Il Milione, often going to Paris where he became friends with Léonce Rosenberg, director of the Galerie de L'Effort Moderne. His chromatic choices evolve towards transparent and brighter shades, even crossing an abstract season. In the years 1949–50, he took part in the establishment of the important Marzocchi collection, sending a self-portrait, Compagni di lavoro, the Collection is today kept in the Pinacoteca Civica di Forlì. In the 50s and 60s painting, Pompeo Borra abandoned the solid and monumental volumes of the previous works, creating works in which he anticipates themes that have come back to life after his death and had a greater critical response in the 1980s with the term postmodern. The two-dimensionality, the intense color scheme and the extreme synthesis of the figures, always immersed in an atmosphere of metaphysical suspension, will be the connotative stylistic features of his later works. His works are preserved in important museums, institutions and private collections, including the Center Pompidou, Paris, Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Milan, Civic Gallery of Modena, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, Museo del Novecento, Milan and Mario Rimoldi Modern Art Museum, Cortina d'Ampezzo. He died in Milan in 1973.