Woman with the Green Fan

While living in Florence, Italy, in the mid- nineteen-tens, Emilio Pettoruti came into contact with avant-garde artists while also furthering his informal art education through visits to the numerous convents, churches, and museums in that city that act as home to major artworks. He combined his work in the studio with study of Italian Trecento and mannerism painting. He would sit in front of works by Early Renaissance artists— Fra Angelico among them—and not only sketch their forms but also record their color schemes in perfect tonal harmony. In that same Italian city, in 1916, he met Xul Solar—and so began a friendship and creative exchange that would last for years. Xul had great impact on Pettoruti, influencing his research as well as his particular reading of cubism to which the relationships between color and light were decisive. First exhibited at the Lyceum in Milan in 1919 as part of a show featuring a great deal of Pettoruti’s Italian production, La del abanico verde is a sound reflection of the artist’s oeuvre.