Corrado Cagli was born in Ancona in 1910 and moved with his family to Rome in 1915. After completing his classical studies, he enrolled at the Academy and frequented the studio of the elderly master Paolo Paschetto. In 1927 he made his debut with a tempera mural in a room in Via Sistina, followed the next year by another mural, this time in lean tempera, in a salon in Via del Vantaggio. Enthusiastically following his 'mural' vocation, in 1930 in Umbertide he produced eight fresco paintings in the Maravelli-Reggiani house. In Umbertide, he was also artistic director of the Rometti ceramics factory, to which he gave a modern and qualitative imprint. From the very beginning, he demonstrated a lively and restless personality, animated by an imaginative and critical intelligence. He set his investigation on a persistent technical and expressive experimentalism. According to Cagli, the artist is the one who expresses himself through a global concept of art and who connects and justifies his specific work within a cultural and ideological context.
In 1932, he held his first solo exhibition together with Adriana Pincherle at the Art Gallery in Rome. Among other things, he exhibited photomontages of sports subjects. In the same year, he approached Giuseppe Capogrossi and Emanuele Cavalli. Together they formed the "Nuova pittura Romana" group and at the end of 1932 in Rome, the three artists exhibited in the Galleria d'Arte in Rome and in 1933 in Milan in the Galleria Il Milione. Towards the end of the year, while they were drafting the Manifesto of Plastic Primordialism, to be published on the occasion of their exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Bonjean (December 1933), they quarrelled over theoretical differences and practical matters and definitively dissolved their association.
In those years in Rome, despite being only 20 years old, he was considered the leading exponent of the new artistic generation ("Cagli woke the dead in these years" Guttuso wrote in 1951). He animated a group of very young artists: Mirko, Afro, Ziveri, Guttuso, Fazzini, who gravitated around the gallery of Dario Sabatello, who was also very young. He also exercised an intense theoretical and critical activity from the pages of important magazines, including the rationalist architecture magazine “Quadrante”, directed by Pier Maria Bardi and Massimo Bontempelli (the artist's uncle). There he announced, still confident and enthusiastic about the Regime, “a dawn of primordialism” in which “the imagination relives all the astonishments and trembles with all the mysteries” (Anticipi sulla scuola di Roma, 1933). Again from the columns of “Quadrante”, he took part in the debate on mural painting and invoked the "collaboration of the arts" (architecture and painting) and the need to “make muscles for a cyclic and polyphonic art” (Muri ai pittori [Walls to the painters], 1933).
Among other wall-paintings he executed: a fresco for the V Triennale (1933), four panels for the II Quadriennale (1935), a large cycle entitled Trionfo di Mussolini [Triumph of Mussolini], for the Paris International Exhibition (1937), defining a new mythological and social function of painting. From 1935 to 1938 he was the animator, in the role of advisor, of the Cometa Gallery in Rome, directed by Libero de Libero and inaugurated with an exhibition of fifty of his drawings (1935). In 1936 he held a one-man show there and in 1937 and 1938 he exhibited at the Cometa in New York.
In 1936, the VI International Triennale opens at the Palazzo dell'Arte in Milan. Cagli presents a large painting, 6x6 meters, in encaustic tempera, La Battaglia di San Martino e Solferino [The Battle of San Martino and Solferino], which will then be donated to the Uffizi.
In 1938, faced with the onslaught of racial persecution, being of Jewish origin, he took refuge in Paris and then in New York (1939), where he opened a studio. In 1941, having become an American citizen, he enlisted in the army and participated in the war in Europe. He entered the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany and executed a series of dramatic drawings.
In 1947, the Studio d'Arte Palma in Rome, directed by Bardi, held an exhibition of his new non-figurative works. They were born out of his love for non-Euclidean geometry, from which he drew spatial and structural motifs that he defined as a "world of the nth dimension", the result, however, of a "lyrical imagination" (Bontempelli 1947). In 1948, he returned definitively to Rome. From this moment on, according to his multiple research method, he experimented with different techniques and expressive languages that were strongly abstract or non-figurative (neo-metaphysics, neo-cubism, informal, etc.). He also works in the field of theatre. He won the Guggenheim Prize (1946) and the Marzotto Prize (1954).
Corrado Cagli died in Rome in 1976.
