Porto Santo Stefano

Description

President's House object Summary
Born in Udine, in Northern Italy, Afro began to assist his father and uncle in mural painting at a young age. He attended school in Venice and followed his brothers to study painting and sculpture in Florence. After winning an art competition in his native Udine, he traveled with his brothers to Rome for further studies.
During the 1930s Afro developed as a painter as Italy's Fascist government culturally isolated the country. He worked on murals and received commmissions for frescoes and mosaics in Udine. Recruited into the military in 1940, he was wounded in Albania and escaped, living undercover in Rome and Venice. After the war he supported himself making and selling jewelry. In the 1950s Afro began to travel more widely, exhibiting at a gallery in New York and teaching at Mills College in California. He eventually settled in Udine, working out of a castle-studio, and holding an honorary teaching position at the art academy in Florence.
This work is from an important period in Afro's career, a time in the early 1950s when he expanded his materials and developed a more complex pictorial sense. Forms in the foreground and background are blended together, colors are close in tonality, and some texture and surface variation is introduced. And important element is the use of dynamic line that suggests architectural forms and defines space, both on the canvas surface and in an imagined depth. The overall effect is subtle and, when combined with a title that references a city on the coast northwest of Rome, the work becomes suggestive and evocative, like the memory of a place.
(Agnes Miner, Ann Sinfield)