Happiness

Executed in 1925, the painting depicts a male figure, who bears a close resemblance to the artist himself, in the open countryside. The man is sitting on the grass with a hat and book on the ground next to him, and looking up at the sky; on the left, a white farmhouse lies half-hidden amidst the greenery.The theme alludes to the desire to escape from the present and seek refuge in an other dimension. Aldo Carpi fought as a volunteer in World War I from which he returned deeply scarred, developing a certain aversion to city and social life, and a profound love of nature. These were feelings – which many in those years of enthusiastic urban development in Italy did not share – that Carpi and Raffaele De Grada had in common. In this painting the colour is applied with broad brushstrokes and the forms are not sharply defined. The technique is very different from the one used by several Novecento Italiano and Magic Realism artists, and with respect to the latter Happiness seems programmatic, since it shows that Carpi adopted a position midway between that school and the tradition of Lombard Naturalism. In fact, the artist did not reject the teachings of Cesare Tallone under whom he studied at the Brera Academy, but, at the same time, and possibly on the advice of his friend the gallerist Lino Pesaro, he exhibited his work along with members of the Novecento Italiano in the ‘Pittori Italiani: Futuristi e Avanguardisti’ section of the 3rd Rome Bienniale in 1925. He continued to develop landscape painting in the 1930s, as can be seen in Basin of St. Mark in Venice of 1937, also in the Collection. After World War II, and having survived the Gusen concentration camp, Carpi was appointed director of the Brera Academy where he had taught painting from 1930.