Old presses

Savelli loved bassa
Source: Giornale di Brescia

29 April 1995

A great painter of our times has died in Boldeniga
A guest of the Argenterio-Ghidini family

Boldeniga – "His body will remain here at the Castello of Boldeniga until Sunday. Then he will go back to his land, closer to the prayers of his sister Vincenza, the sole survivor of five siblings."

Susanna Argenterio reports the final hours of Angelo Savelli, one of the greatest contemporary painters in the world, who has died in the town of the "Bassa bresciana" (the Po Valley near Brescia) in the night of April 27th, following a lethal bout of bronchial pneumonia. He often came here to visit his friends, the Argenterio-Ghidini family, after meeting Susanna Argenterio ten years ago in New York, where the girl from Brescia was following a cinematography class.

Angelo Savelli was born in Pizzo Calabro in 1911. After his classical studies he moved to Rome in 1930. From 1940 to 1953 he worked as a teacher, while cultivating his artistic activity. In 1945 he founded the Art Club with Jarema, Guzzi, Severini, Fazzini, Tamburi and Montanarini.

Savelli's first works dominated by white date back to 1946-47, but a trip to Paris in 1948 disrupts the artist's sources of inspiration and projects him in a vaster and more international dimension of art. He said: "I understood I had to break free from my divine Italian tradition..."

In 1953 he marries journalist Elizabeth Fischer, then moves to New York for good; there he meets the most important artists of our time and works with architect Louis Kahn, who died in 1974, recognized by world critics as one of the greatest architects of all times.

In the "Bassa bresciana", inside the Renaissance palace of Boldeniga, he drew solace from the hospitality of the Ghidini-Argenterio family. The flavour of white scattered in so many works, the white of childhood and snow, of white love and white clouds. The white of mists pierced by the sun, and down there the white of farmhouses on the run from poverty.

The white, at last, of a sudden death, that caught him at the height of a white serenity.

White with hopes.

Author: Tonino Zana

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