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Study for
The Death
of Caesar |
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A flyer celebrating the victory of
the International Brigades in the battle of Guadalajara, in March 1937, was the cause of
his arrest in that same year and imprisonment for the crime of association for the purpose
of political conspiracy. The artist was working at the time on a large scale work, The
Big Café, which he finished after he came
out of prison. As a prisoner - almost a year and a half between Milan, Rome, and Fossano -
Sassu continued to work, leaving behind a significant corpus of drawings. The dual
register of his art, between reality and myth, continued to distinguish his artistic
production even after his release. |
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Café |
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The cycle on the theme of the Maison Tellier, which began at the end of the 30s and lasted almost twenty years,
fits into the vein of realism, even though it had
an openly literary inspiration. It was balanced by further development in works on a sacred theme, which intensified during the war years, taking on the sense of
a bringing into focus of the passion and suffering of men, counterpoised by the sarcasm
expressed about certain terrestrial characteristics of the Church (the series of Councils). |
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Athaliah |
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The daily and intrusive presence of
violence can be perceived even more directly in subjects like Athaliah and in his renewed attention to battle scenes, to which are generally connected the various representations
of men on horseback, fighting with each other or involved in solitary undertakings -
variations on the motif of the red men and the horses and horsemen of 1930-31 - developed in those years and
resumed subsequently up to recent years. Contemporary
with the pictures of horsemen and battles, Sassu was painting Piazzale
Loreto, reproposing the dialectic between
representation of the contemporary and a bringing
up to date of myth which is a constantly
recurring basic theme in his work. |
