Aldo Carpi

(b Milan, 6 Oct 1886; d Milan, 27 March 1973). Italian painter. He devoted himself to painting from an early age, and from 1906 he studied with Cesare Tallone at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, where he met the painters Achille Funi (1890-1972), Carlo Carr? and Siro Penagini (1885-1952). He moved in the same Milanese avant-garde circles as Umberto Boccioni, Gaetano Previati, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and others. His paintings often took lyrical themes, but they were treated in a highly individual expressionistic style. In 1914 he took part in the Venice Biennale, where he received a prize for After Supper (1913; Florence, Pitti). In the following year he began the theme of masks, which was to remain a constant feature of his output. He was active during World War I on the Albanian front (1915), where he created a series of drawings published in Milan in 1917 under the title Serbia eroica. After demobilization (1919) he resumed his painting career, depicting not only masks but also marine subjects, portraits and domestic scenes (e.g. Family Portrait, 1927; Milan, Gal. A. Mod.). He also designed a number of stained-glass windows in Milan, for example in S Simpliciano (1928) and for the cathedral (begun 1932-4, completed 1947). In 1930 he became Professor of Painting at the Accademia in Milan; however, in 1944 he was deported to the concentration camp of Mauthausen and later to Gusen, where he remained until 1945. He relived this dramatic experience in the surviving pages of the Diario di Gusen (published 1971) and, more especially, in a series of drawings made either from life in the concentration camp itself or later from memory. On his return to Milan he was appointed Director of the Accademia and in 1950 he began another cycle of masks, entitled Carabinieri; from 1962 he concentrated on the series Circus and Clowns. In 1968 he provided the cartoons for the decoration of the Church of the Annunciation, Nazareth.

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