Cosimo Privato, Venetian Painting Representing A Family Portrait

Cosimo Privato
Venice, 1899 - 1971

Family portrait
oil on panel, cm. 70x80
within frame

Signed lower right: "C. Privato"

The painting, in excellent condition, depicts a middle-aged couple seated, with the female figure placed sideways in front of the male figure.

Extremely realistic, like the whole series of portraits made by the well-known Venetian painter, the work is also distinguished by the careful use of the material and the choice of colors with the sharp contrast between light and dark, with the white of the shirt and the color red lips of the woman to stand out sharply.

Born in Venice in 1899, Privato joined the Royal Higher School of Art applied to Industries in 1919, based in the old Carmini convent, where he attended the section of pictorial decoration and later obtained the qualification for professional artistic teaching.

Like many young artists of the same generation (Juti Ravenna, Neno Mori, Eugenio Da Venezia, Luigi Scarpa Croce and others), he turns to the activity of the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa, which since 1908 has reserved young artists the opportunity to exhibit in the rooms of Ca 'Pesaro. Here Privato will make his debut in the annual collective of 1920 with three works (The Hermitage, Self-portrait, Portrait). Although this is a particular edition, devoid of the protagonists of the first season of Capesarina - in fact, the protest of the "dissident" artists raged, who exhibited in parallel at the Geri Boralevi gallery in Piazza San Marco - it represents for the artist the beginning of a continuous participation in the events of Bevilacqua La Masa, which will intervene until the thirty-first edition of 1940.

From 1922 to 1923 he was granted a studio on the third floor of Ca 'Pesaro to exercise his artistic activity (assignment renewed for the three-year period 1925-1927); in 1932 he was also a member, together with Carlo Dalla Zorza, Juti Ravenna, Bruno Saetti and Toni Lucarda, of the exhibition acceptance jury.

It is undoubtedly starting from the mid-1920s that his work achieved considerable notoriety both locally and nationally. From 1926 to 1938 his paintings appear at the International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice, where he stands out among the youngest exhibitors; in the same years, he also participated in the exhibitions of Italian art organized abroad by the Biennale itself (an example, in 1933, the exhibition of modern Italian art organized by the National Fascist Fine Arts Union and presented by Antonio Maraini at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna ).

In the Italian context of the 1920s and 1930s, we can also recall the important participations in the III Biennale Romana (1925) and the II Quadriennale di Roma (1935), in the International Expositions of Fine Arts in Rijeka (1925, 1927), in the exhibitions organized by the Society for Fine Arts of Milan (1924, 1925) and at the Trade Union Exhibitions of the Tre Venezie. The numerous purchases made on the occasion of the exhibitions (by King Vittorio Emanuele III, the City of Bari, the Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, the Municipality of Venice, the Prefecture of Venice, the Ministry of National Education, the Banca d ' Italy) confirm the appreciation received.

Although late, if considered in relation to the times and the contemporary development of avant-garde currents, the prolific season of the Twenties and Thirties constitutes a significant piece of the figurative tradition of the Venetian and Venetian area: the artist's pictorial production shows in fact remarkable it benefits both in the drafting of the color, thanks to the agility of the brushstroke and the skilful choice of shades, as in the conception and rendering of the subjects; if the genre of the portrait is the favorite, and more generally of the composition with figure, Privato does not lack inventiveness and over the years gives life to an eclectic catalog of characters and situations, showing a marked decorative vein combined with lively gifts of narrator.

In the forties and especially after the war, the exhibition activity of Privato was contained, in the face of a progressive withdrawal from the public scene and an ever greater distance from the Venetian environment; of note are some personal exhibitions held in Venetian galleries (at the Venice gallery in 1945, at the Sandri gallery in 1946, at the Ongania gallery in 1947) and participation in the group of "della Valigia" painters, gathered around the Hotel Gorizia. It is rather Mario Coscia's Galleria Trieste that regularly hosts the artist's solo exhibitions from the 1940s to the end of the 1950s (1941, 1947, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1956), in which the scenes of genre (The masquerade, 1947) and a reinterpretation, sometimes quick and summary, of the subjects that have studded the entire span of his artistic career.