Mata Hari

Mata Hari   is an original charcoal and watercolour drawing on paper, realized around the Seventies by the great Italian artist and journalist, Mino Maccari (Siena, 1898 - 1989).

Signed in pencil on the lower right margin.

With the incredible satiric and caustic touch of the illustrator of Il Selvaggio , this contemporray artwork depicts the legendary figure of Mata Hari , the popular Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy for Germany during World War I.

Indeed and erotic dance under the penetrating eyes of the spectator is represented with the fluid charcoal on a ochre background.

Mounted under a cardboard passepartout, cm 50 x 34.5, this original Maccari’s drawing surely could enrich your private collectiuon with a Italian satiric touch and elegance!

Mino Maccari  (Siena, 1898 – Rome, 1989)

Mino Maccari was a popular Italian painter and engraver with a caustic personality, called in 1924 by Angiolo Bencini to collaborate as illustrator for   Il Selvaggio , an admittedly intransigent fascist, revolutionary and anti-bourgeois magazine. Here Maccari published his first engravings, and after he took over the direction of the Savage which he held until 1942.

In 1959, he became the director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome; in 1963, he won Antonio Feltrinelli's prize for painting and became president of the San Luca Academy in 1962 . In the same year of one of the biggest Italian accademic honour, Maccari managed to obtain a personal exhibition at Gallery 63 in New York.

His production of drawings, watercolors, tempera, lithographs etc. is exhausted, sometimes in collaboration with prestigious publishing houses ( Strapaese, Il selvaggio), of satirical, political or erotic subject matters.