Pio Santini

Nude with Lace, Pastel Study Painting by Pio Santini

circa 1940

Pio Santini was born on April 17th, 1908 in Tivoli, Italy. He showed precocious artistic taste and gifts, in drawing and painting. In 1933, he moved to Paris, in Montparnasse, the artists' area, where he settled in his first studio. He can be considered a member of the Academy of Paris, a significant artistic movement of the first half of the 20th Century along which Amedeo Modigliani. While attending the classes of the Estienne School in plastic art, Santini started to attract attention in various Parisian Salons (the Winter Salon, the Independents Salon, and the French Artists one). WWII, the conflict between his native and his adopted country upset him a lot. He played a part in the resuming cultural exchanges between France and Italy, by founding, the association "The Romans in Paris" after the war, and by creating the Villa d’Este Prize for about 10 years, rewarding each year a French artist. Later, the "Montparnasse Prize" would reward Italian artists in Paris in the same way. Devoted to painting, he worked as an art illustrator for edition and press and left us a rich work from this period. In the 1960s, Santini decided to live on his painting. He took an active part in many group exhibitions in France and abroad. He regularly exhibited in Parisian salons most of which he was a member. As an assiduous participant in the Salon of the French Artists, he was often rewarded: Great Price of the Salon in 1970, in 1974, gold medal in 1971, Prize-winner of the Ernest Marché in 1974. Santini lived his last years in Garches, near Paris. He worked there until he died at the age of 78. Keeping himself a part of the avant-garde of contemporary art, Santini developed a personal work of formal coherence steadily. He is a two-time artist, the beginnings of his career, the Thirties, and his rebirth, the Sixties when the artist can again paint. Between these two periods, WWII badly hit his pictorial growth, yet it had all started auspiciously for the young painter whose determination to be devoted to painting is clearly shown in his self-portrait, 1928. The Thirties, after the revolutions of cubism, abstraction, and surrealism, had made figurative art fashionable again, by the assertion of an aesthetic vitality quite close to Pio Santini’s concerns. His former sculptor talent (Bust of Count Colonna, 1929) can be found in his painting in the proportions and volumes of the bodies. His nudes have a hedonist vitality in which the animated touch intensifies the sensuality. The chosen subjects are traditional and the approach is deliberately figurative, but the animated touch of Santini, his bold but sure taste for colors, transfigures his iconography. The 1960s triumphing language tended more towards Pop Art, opposite to Santini’s pictorial universe. Modernity wanted then to be synonymous with progress and provocation. These concepts nourished the uncompromising avant-garde ideology. On the other hand, Santini was in keeping with the figurative tradition.