The Mute and Motionless Things of Felice Casorati

An idea cherished since the early 1920s, the first opportunity for Felice Casorati to design the architecture of a space – an initial exercise from which the projects of his “mute and motionless things” would take shape. On the centenary of its inauguration in 1925, this episode celebrates Cesarina and Riccardo Gualino’s Domestic Theatre: a space that dissolves the boundaries between stage representation and life.

Intro

The Domestic Theatre of Cesarina and Riccardo Gualino by Maurizio Cilli and Stefano Mirti

Purchased in 1917 from the De Fernex bankers, a villa at the intersection of Via Galliari and Viale dei Tigli – the original name of today’s Corso Massimo D’Azeglio – became the private residence in Turin of Cesarina and Riccardo Gualino. Overlooking Valentino Park, it was the perfect home in which to cultivate the art of hospitality and welcome the city’s cultural elite.

Between 1923 and 1924, following the expansion of the former De Fernex villa designed by engineer Andrea Torasso, the idea of creating a small stage space began to take shape.
Until that time, the Gualinos had devoted their attention and passion to ancient art. Their collection included precious furniture, archaeological artefacts, carpets, jewellery, sculptures, ceramics, and extraordinary masterpieces of Italian art – Giotto, Cimabue, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Botticelli, Andrea di Bartolo, Mantegna, Andrea Pisano, Filippo Lippi, Paolo Veronese and Titian.

Years earlier, their friendship with Jessie Boswell – an English painter from Leeds and future member of the Group of Six Painters of Turin – had marked the first step towards the formation of the artistic circle that would gather around the two patrons. The meeting with Lionello Venturi in 1918 proved decisive in redirecting the Gualinos’ collecting choices. It was his influence that led them towards a “taste for the Primitives”, opening the way to the new scene of modern art.

Among the young artists recommended by Venturi was the Turin-born Felice Casorati, with whom they developed a deep artistic bond. A trusted friend and portraitist of the Gualino family, Casorati was invited to set up his studio in the villa’s greenhouse on Via Galliari.

Before long, Casorati’s greenhouse became a meeting place for Turin’s artists. It was frequented by Francesco Menzio, Carlo Levi, and, of course, Jessie Boswell, who – together with Gigi Chessa, Nicola Galante and Enrico Paulucci – later formed the Group of Six Painters of Turin (1929–1931).

For Gualino, patronage was an enterprise – an investment in ideas and in artists who looked to the future. Equally decisive was the figure of Cesarina Gurgo Salice, his partner and accomplice in sharing a passion for the arts. From 1921, Cesarina attended dance classes inspired by Isadora Duncan, and in the summer of 1922 she studied at La Palestra in Deauville, Normandy, a gymnastic college directed by naval captain Georges Hébert.

The following year, Samuel Gourevitch – a wealthy landowner of Ukrainian origin and Riccardo Gualino’s business partner in the timber trade – asked the couple to host his sisters, Bella and Raja Markmann, in Turin. Originally from Kiev, where Bella graduated in piano, she later met Egon Hutter in Odessa, a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian army and her future husband, with whom she would eventually seek refuge in Turin.

In 1923, Bella Hutter Markmann founded a dance school in Via Arsenale – a true gymnasium open to all, where the art of dance was given an educational role free from academic rhetoric.

From this deep intertwining of friendships and shared passions emerged the project for an experimental domestic theatre – a space designed to dissolve the boundaries between stage and everyday life, between the public and the private sphere.

Here, with what he himself called “an act of courage,” Gualino entrusted Casorati – a painter untouched by the rules of tradition – with the opportunity to conceive the architecture of such an exceptional space. Casorati involved in the venture the young architect Alberto Sartoris, whom he had met at the home of Annibale Rigotti. Together, they envisioned an extraordinary experience: beyond a curved wooden staircase opened an austere grey-and-black interior, beneath an exceptional white semi-domed ceiling supported by stepped shelves and decorated with fourteen bas-reliefs modelled by Casorati, set like metopes within the frieze running along the upper walls of the theatre.

Gualino himself took care to procure tubular lamps from Germany to conceal within the frieze, softening the contrast of light against the pure, meditative lines of the slender nudes, the sleeping figures, and the dreamlike spaces evoking a mysterious elsewhere inhabited by beauty and joy.

One hundred polished black wooden chairs, with gently curved backs and grey cushions, rose in stepped tiers; the woollen curtain was grey, edged in red; on either side of the proscenium stood two scarlet pedestals supporting chalk figures – allegories of Comedy and Tragedy – modelled by Casorati. The black floor completed the harmony of grey, black, and red tones. Sartoris’s contribution to the project was exemplary, as his bold proto-rationalist lines reduced post-Deco ornamentation to the bare minimum.

A masterpiece of simplicity and restraint, the Teatrino was inaugurated on 27 April 1925. It housed the new premises of Bella Hutter’s school and the dance company formed by her sister Raja, by Cesarina herself, and by their English friend Cynthia Maugham – sister of Daphne, who, while visiting Turin, met and married Casorati.

Their contribution to this rare episode of patronage dedicated to artistic experimentation was invaluable: an avant-garde laboratory and an elite cultural salon that profoundly shaped the artistic identity of twentieth-century Turin. Its story – from creation to tragic destiny – stands as a metaphor for the very lives of the Gualinos: a journey marked by visionary ambition, intense activity, and a fragmented legacy.

Who

Felice Casorati by Maurizio Cilli and Stefano Mirti

Felice Casorati was born in Novara in 1883. After studying law, he devoted himself to art, beginning his apprenticeship under the guidance of Giovanni Vianello.
In 1907 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and later at Ca’ Pesaro and the Roman Secession.

In 1915 he was drafted into the army, and two years later, following the tragic death of his father, he moved permanently to Turin with his family, settling in a house-studio on Via Mazzini.
The war and his father’s death left a profound mark, reflected in the anguished atmosphere of his large tempera paintings from 1919–1920.

In Turin, he formed an important friendship with the young Piero Gobetti, who in 1923 published the first monograph dedicated to him. Casorati soon became a central figure in Turin’s cultural life.
His role as a cultural catalyst was evident at the 1923 Quadriennale del Valentino, where, as curator of Room IX, he invited both established artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, and young Turin painters including Gigi Chessa, Francesco Menzio, Carlo Levi, and Enrico Paulucci Morando.

A decisive turning point came with his meeting with the industrialist and collector Riccardo Gualino, who commissioned him not only to paint portraits of himself and his family, but also to design the ambitious Domestic Theatre of Cesarina and Riccardo Gualino, located at Via Galliari 28 in Turin. The stage space, inaugurated in 1925, saw the artist working closely with the architect Alberto Sartoris.

Casorati’s influence extended to the world of theatre as well: in 1933, he made his debut as a set designer for the first edition of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

In 1941 he was appointed Professor of Painting at the Accademia Albertina in Turin, where he became Director in 1952 and President in 1954.

In 1955 he took part in the first edition of Documenta in Kassel; in 1980 his work was featured in the exhibition Les Réalismes 1919–1939, curated by Jean Clair at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and later, in 1981, at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Berlin.

A central figure in twentieth-century art, Casorati’s work and artistic legacy continue to be celebrated in major international retrospectives and exhibitions.
In 1961, an embolism led to the amputation of his left leg. Felice Casorati died at his home in Turin on 1 March 1963.

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