Migneco Giuseppe, Woman Portrait, 1950s, Watercolor On Paper

Beautiful Italian watercolor on paper signed Francesco Gonzaga important italian artist. Woman Portrait. Dimensions with frame.
Migneco Giuseppe
(Messina, 9 February 1903 - Milan, 28 February 1997)
Giuseppe Migneco was born in Messina in 1908. Once he graduated from high school in his city, he continued his studies in Milan and at the end of the 1920s he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine. But university life soon tired him, after he abandoned the courses he came into contact with emerging personalities such as De Grada and Sassu, thanks also to the help of his childhood friend Joppolo who moved with him to Milan.

These were the years in which he began to devote himself completely to painting, starting with some occasional collaborations as an advertising graphic at a tie firm, and as an illustrator for the Corriere dei Piccoli. In 1939 his first works such as Cavallerizza and Pagliaccio, Pianist and Resting Vagabonds, Dry Flowers, exhibited at the Permanente in Milan. Migneco's paintings are mainly inspired by the Sicilian popular world: shepherds, fishermen and peasants who were for years the main object of his painting but who over time were also the cause of his degradation, especially in the production of the last years in which the artist proposed a cliché of a nostalgic, immutable and archaic Sicily that over time completely crystallized his painting, preventing him from approaching more original forms of painting.

Several exhibitions were held from the 1940s onwards in different parts of Italy such as Genoa, Bergamo, Milan and Novara which saw the exhibition of works such as The Shepherds of the Island, the Lizard Hunters and the Prelates who baptize. During these years, he collaborated with the publishing industry for which he created several illustrative sketches such as the one for the volume of Russian peasant poetry.

After the liberation, his artistic activity interrupted due to the war, he exhibited for the first time at the Radegonda gallery in Milan and then in 1948 participated in the Rome Quadriennale and the Venice Biennale in 1954 in which he exhibited The boy who peels lemons, Peasants in the orange grove and seeds. In 1970 Migneco set up a personal exhibition at the Robinia in Palermo which was then followed by several exhibitions on an annual basis throughout Italy. He died in Milan in 1997.