Among hundreds of authors and thousands of works, the Venice Biennale inaugurated on April 17th, it returns the name and extraordinary story of two artists from Bergamo: the sculptor Edoardo Daniele Villa (1915-2011) and the painter Romualdo Locatelli (1905-1943). Their works are at the Corderie dell’Arsenale, a few meters from each other.
The Argentine curator Adriano Pedrosa he wanted them in the section Italians Everywherean exhibition dedicated to that foreign legion armed with brushes, colors and chisels that from the beginning of the 20th century, well ahead of globalisation, left the Peninsula and to follow the example of Gauguin: going around the world in search of new and stimulating realities, living and working in distant countries, in contact with peoples not contaminated by Western civilization, outside the circuit of galleries, auction houses and museums.
Villapresent in the Biennale with an impressive bronze maternitysettled in South Africa, where he arrived in 1941 as a prisoner of war. He appropriated the formal values oftribal art, developed a neo-cubist plastic language and became a reference figure for the cultural and artistic rebirth of the country. He led a delegation of South African artists to the Biennale five times and his adopted country dedicated a museum to him at the University of Pretoria.
Descendant of a Bergamo dynasty of painters, too Romualdo Locatelliwho in the last twenty years has become one of the most sought-after authors of our 20th century abroad, with prices close to one million euros, does not arrive at the Biennale for the first time. In 1938, at the age of 33 he was living in Rome and he was already at the peak of success. The future king of Italy Umberto IIhad commissioned him the portrait of her children Vittorio Emanuele and Maria Pia, two paintings which, before being hung in the Savoy house, had ended up in the Venetian exhibition. This year for the exhibition at the Corderie dell’Arsenale Pedrosa wanted the painting of one Balinese dancerone of the subjects that Romualdo (so as not to confuse him with eight other Locatelli painters) created starting from 1939when he turned his back on money, fame and the best clients in Italy, and was followed by his wife Erminia set course towards the East. He stopped in Indonesiawent down to Jakartathen to Bali where he discovered the beauty of traditional dances and managed to capture the sinuous movements of the young women, engaged in Legong and in other dances with an almost photographic technique.
The painting exhibited at the Biennale, on loan from the Pasifika museum in Bali, is considered one of the masterpieces of the Asian period. A limited lot of paintings highly sought after by Chinese collectors who fought in the auctions of Hong Kong pushing them skyrocketing prices. The painter is always the same and the pictorial quality does not change. But if a shepherdess from the Bergamo valleys or Sardinia is sold at auction for a few thousand euros, the portrait of an oriental girl can fetch millions of Hong Kong dollars on the Chinese market. The exchange rate is 0.12 euros, but it means that the girl with Ibiscus sold by Christie’s in 2010 for over 6 million HK dollars cost 720 thousand euros and Tigah, the Indonesian deity, sold in 2016 by the same auction house for 4 million and 240 thousand HK dollars, it exceeded 500 thousand euros.
The records were also set in Hong Kong by Sotheby’s for the Gambuh dancer sold for 800 thousand euros in 2010 and for the Balinese girl who in 2016 at Bonhams almost reached 900 thousand (https://www.bonhams.com/auction/22890/lot/5/romualdo-locatelli-1905-1943-balinese-girl/ ). A lot of money, but according to rumors circulating on the art market, much more, well over one million euros, would have circulated in the private negotiations took place between collectors, with the intermediation of the great merchants of Singapore and Hong Kong. After all, there are very few works left in circulation. Moreover, Romualdo’s oriental adventure did not last long and ended suddenly and mysterious after a few years.
At the outbreak of World War II the painter left Bali and moved to Philippines. He became the leader of an oriental pictorial movement, was the protagonist of the artistic life of the archipelago and in 1941 exhibited in a gallery of New York. February 24th 1943during the Japanese occupation, Romualdo put his rifle on his shoulder, said goodbye to his wife, and went out hunting on the heights of Rizaleast of the capital Manila. He never returned. Endless hypotheses were made about her end, but none ever found evidence that could confirm it. Her paintings remain. An antiques dealer from the center of Bergamo comments: “Most are in the city and a treasure could be hanging on the walls of some homes, without the owners’ knowledge.”
