Luigi BRACCHI (Tirano, Sondrio 1892 – Milano 1978)
Born in Tirano, in the province of Sondrio, in 1892, Bracchi moved to Milan at the age of twenty, where he attended the Brera Academy and the studio of Giuseppe Ronchi from Brescia. He cultivated landscape and figure painting, using various techniques (oil, tempera, pastel, encaustic). In the lively Milanese artistic environment of the 1930s, he became a friend and frequent visitor of leading figures such as Aldo Carpi, Carlo Carrà, Achille Funi, Pietro Annigoni and Alberto Savinio. He was also a sculptor and journalist, collaborating as a correspondent for the periodical “Le peintre” in Paris. Already in 1934, Edoardo Persico highlighted him for his “exemplary modernity”. Later, in the 1950s, Leonardo Borgese and Enrico Somarè would also recognize and appreciate his artistic talent. He participated in numerous exhibitions, especially in Italy. He married the futurist painter and sculptor Regina Bracchi Cassolo.
Bracchi does not feel that anxiety for novelty and that need for new languages that was common to many artists of his generation. His Alpine landscapes, but above all his seascapes and his portraits, always remain within a measured realism that grants little to contemporary artistic currents, while still managing to express their own, sober modernity. “The decorative solutions of contemporary painting attract him – wrote Somaré in 1952 – but the plant of abstract art does not grow in his mind. The task of abstracting he entrusts to the truth. He wants to fulfill that of painting it well. His paintings are clean, drawn clearly, dressed in silky tempera, dripping with color, they smile”. Bracchi died in Milan in 1978.