Arturo CIACELLI (Arnara 1883 – Venezia 1966)
Arturo Ciacelli was a great Ciociaria artist, a futurist, and a leading figure in national and international artistic research in the first half of the last century.
He began working in Rome, assisting his father, a mosaic artist. He assisted Duilio Cambellotti and Alessandro Bazzani in the set design for the Teatro Argentina. He attended free courses at the Academy of Fine Arts, where in 1909 he met the Swedish painter Elsa Ström. He married her that same year and moved to Sweden. He soon exhibited in Stockholm and Malmö, then in Copenhagen, Gothenburg, and Oslo.
Along with Balla, Boccioni, Severini, and others, he had already participated with five works in the first “Salone dei Refusati” (1905). In 1911, in Paris, he frequented Delaunay and met Léger, Braque, Chagall, and others. He returned to Sweden and in 1912 held his first solo exhibition at the Lund University Gallery, presented by the poet Gian-Maria Cominetti. From 1915 until the 1930s, he worked in Stockholm, where he also directed the Nya konstgalleriet, Stockholm’s first modern art gallery, where he exhibited works by Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay Terk, Van Dongen, Dufy, Léger, Ozenfant, Picasso, Rouault, Vlaminck, Kandinsky, and Severini. He introduced Cubism and Futurism and was a great cultural promoter and promoter, organizing conferences, musical evenings, and “color concerts,” color films he created. He received an official accolade from Guillaume Apollinaire in the Paris-Journal.
In 1930, he participated in the Venice Biennale with the entire Futurist group. In 1935, F.T. Marinetti presented a solo exhibition in Turin, thus becoming “an active exponent of the second phase of Futurism.”
In 1937, he moved to Vienna. He taught at the local Italian school and exhibited at the Italian Cultural Institute until 1960. During this period, he reconnected with his Milanese friends and joined the Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC). He oriented himself toward a painting of geometric forms “sometimes reminiscent of some of his friend Arp’s compositions” (Dorfles, 1952).
He died in Venice in 1966.