Rome finally celebrates "Titina of nights": what the Titina Maselli exhibition looks like

She resolutely pursued her own, painterly journey to the end of the night. And, from the pitch bottoms of simple things, immersed in the darkness of the metropolis, she managed to ignite her palette. To shoot acid colors and elevate acrobatic athletes on the skyline of skyscrapers. One hundred years after her birth, Rome finally celebrates Titina Maselli (1924 - 2005). “Titina of the nights” they called her when, very young, on the rubble of the Eternal City that had come out of the Ventennio, she went off - easel on her shoulder, and boards prepared in black by a carriage-maker - to paint en-plein-air the protagonists of the neo-realist urban landscape: trucks, streetcar wires, tunnels, motorcycles, buildings encircled by scaffolding.

One of Titina Maselli’s favorite places to document live on Rome at night starting from below, from the street, was Piazza Fiume, the clearing a stone’s throw from Porta Pia, exactly halfway along the Nomentana, between the Casino dei Principi of Villa Torlonia and the Museo laboratorio della Sapienza (Mlac). These are, these, the two venues where the Capitoline Superintendency and the University, City and State opened their spaces to host, until April 21 (the exhibition opened last December 12), 90 works by the Roman painter who reinterpreted the Futurist avant-garde and preconceived Pop art, yet without ever sharing the labels that were being attached to her, rather elegantly shrugging them off.

At the Casino dei Principi - home of the well-deserving Archivi della Scuola romana, a trend from which Modesta (Titina) Maselli took her cue by placing herself in the wake of the expressionist component of a Mario Mafai - the painter welcomes visitors through self-portraits (the catalog’s cover is the mournful one from around 1948, with large letters outlining her whitewashed, bewildered face) and the beautiful portraits her colleagues made of her: Gilles Aillaud, Piero Guccione and Renzo Vespignani (two paintings each). The exhibition closes on the second floor with a pair of “Titina’s Head” and other Soutine-like portraits made in 1943-1945 by Toti Scialoja, her husband until 1950, and one of those “Four Off the Street” (with Piero Sadun, Giovanni Stradone and Arnaldo Ciarrocchi) within the framework of which Maselli’s early trials undoubtedly place themselves, but with an originality in the choice of themes that his fellow street artists had not had the courage to tackle. “She dares,” noted writer Corrado Alvaro in introducing her on the occasion of her first solo exhibition at the Obelisco in 1948, “to put in a painting a telephone, a typewriter, one of those pieces of paper that at night make a white lump on the asphalt of the city. [...] Titina Maselli faces something stronger, the night of the cities.”

Daughter of the art critic Ercole Maselli, sister of the director Citto, younger by six years, niece of the composer Mario Labroca, brother of her mother Elena, related to the Pirandellos and having Fausto, the painter, as her initial guide, Titina elected from the start the metropolitan landscape and simple things, among them sports or movie pictures snatched from the magazines, as the territory of choice for her painting. And she has transported this inner urban vision of hers wherever she has lived: from Rome to New York, where she resided from 1952 to 1955, but isolated, programmatically ignoring environments and outcomes of U.S. Abstract Expressionism; then to Klagenfurt, following her companion, the diplomat Marco Franscisci di Baschi, until 1958; then to Paris where, alternating with Rome, she would settle often from 1968, often to work for the theater as a set designer, but where she had gone already very young, being thunderstruck by the light of Manet’s bodies.

The anthological exhibition at Villa Torlonia and the Mlac-which comes ten years after the Roman show curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and focused, for the 100th anniversary of the Italian National Olympic Committee, on the sports themes of the painter who, a constant presence at Venetian Biennials and Roman Quadrennials, was famous for injured soccer players and exhausted boxers- documents well how from the crumpled cigarette packets in Rome or the livid skyscrapers depicted in the Big Apple, one arrives in the 1960s at trucks seen from the car that follows them (splendid mechanical entrails in the pre-1965 Truck in the Capitoline collections but exhibited at La Sapienza) and athletes projected onto buildings, according to that concept of synthesis of space and time dear to the interpenetrations of Umberto Boccioni, author of the famous Dynamism of a Footballer at the Moma in New York. From small-format panels painted in oil Maselli moved on, following a desire for synthesis, monumentality and light, to large canvases treated with acrylic, and with a skillful use of glossy paints contrasted with opaque backgrounds. But always with night tinging the landscape with darkness.

Amid the injured bombers and exhausted boxers mindful of the Hellenistic Boxer of the Baths of Diocletian, there is room for other subjects in the Roman painter’s iconosphere. For example, from the Civic Collections of Florence, the vast canvas (measuring 209 by 251 centimeters) with “Greta Garbo” as an antidiva, because it was taken from a stolen photo and published in “Omnibus,” exhibited in 1964 alongside works by Giosetta Fioroni, Franco Angeli, Tano Festa and Mario Schifano, at the Venice Biennale that saw Robert Rauschenberg awarded the prize for painting and Pop Art triumph. “They used to call me the grandmother of Pop Art,” Maselli jokingly recalled in the 1996 interview with Enrico Crispolti, which, with the one 32 years earlier with Maurizio Calvesi, is quoted extensively in the exhibition catalog (Electa, 343 pages, 45 euros). Accompanied by the volume enriched by an extensive, almost complete anthology of criticism, the Roman anthology is curated by Claudio Crescentini, Federica Pirani, Ilaria Schiaffini, and Claudia Terenzi (scientific director of the Titina Maselli Archive), authors of in-depth texts in addition to the one, on theater, by Martina Rossi. Few loans from museums since the artist has not enjoyed wide attention from public institutions, although critical recognition has been continuous. And so it is the Alessandro Pasotti and Fabrizio Padovani collection, that of the heirs (Brai-Maselli), the Emiliano and Ottavia Cerasi, and especially the Massimo Minini Gallery, that have offered most of the works useful for this journey to rediscover the work of Maselli, a headstrong individualist grappling with the myths of modern life.

And if at Villa Torlonia, where all the phases of a career spanning more than 50 years are on display, it is the artist’s private dimension that prevails (to this sphere belong the two splendid “Carta segreta” of 1985, powerful pencil drawings executed directly on the sports newspapers from which the subjects are inspired), in the only large room of the Sapienza museum the exhibition route takes its starting point from the 1960s and concludes at the beginning of the new millennium, with a layout that emphasizes the spectacular nature of the scene. Especially large canvases, such as Elevated, Skyscrapers and Wounded Footballer (1984, 4 meters long by 2.50 meters high), are displayed almost seamlessly to place the viewer in the center of an ideal ring. And subject him to a hail of colorful blows, the same that invests the boxers of the three “Boxeurs” canvases placed in triptych. They are one from 1965 and two from 2002, but identical is the point of view of the painter who placed herself at borgo ring. And she let black cloak the match in the night, elevating the sports chronicle to a universal drama. To dedicate some simple, inspired verses to that endless agon as well: “In the circle of the lowered lamp, they fight disheveled to the dull thud/ of blows. Beyond the ropes still clear, tide the darkness packed with next... ”.

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