Piero Marussig
Piero Marussig (Trieste 1879 - Pavia 1937), after having trained in his hometown under the guidance of Eugenio Scomparini, a pupil of Grigoletti, decides to complete his training by traveling between the main European cities, such as Vienna, Munich and Paris, where he is in contact with the Impressionists, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Seurat. After his marriage with Rina Drenik in 1903, he went to Rome to deepen his knowledge of the classics, especially becoming passionate about Titian: his presumed first participation in an exhibition is from this period. Returned to
Trieste continues with a tonal painting with pale and bluish dominants, alternating experiments with etching, including Portrait of a woman (1910). His first documented exhibition dates back to 1906, at the Milan Exposition for the inauguration of the new Simplon pass. His first expressive turning point took place around 1912: an expressionist ignition of color crept into the works of Secessionist and Munich ancestry. From April to October of the same year, moreover, for the first time he participates with the work On the grass at the Venice Biennale, where from this moment he will always be present. Little is known of the war period. In these years, however, he continues to paint, taking the vibration of the sign to the extreme consequences, in some outcomes. Works such as Trees in Bloom of 1917 are structured like a dust of color-matter, innervated by a strong linearism. In the 1920s he abandoned the expressionist period, arriving at a more classical language. In the aftermath of his death, Carrà writes about him: "All the canvases that Marussig left us reveal the moral uprightness of the disinterested artist, the whole work postulates a principle and an ethical end that in themselves transcend it. [...] Marussig would have wanted to be born for the dream, and up to a certain point his existence was that of a loner. He was an aristocrat of the spirit, and had such a pure and strong passion for art that perhaps it was not even understood by us that we were close to him ".
