Autograph by Mino Maccari and Photo

A Autograph Letter Signed by Mino Maccari accompanies a beautiful b/w photographic portrait (cm 14 x 11) of the Italian satiric illustrator and journalist, during his last years. This composition, in perfect condition, is mounted under passepartout, plexiglass, and gilded frame (cm 40.5 x 2 x 54.5).

The manuscript by Mino Maccari is formally addresses to the Cometa Gallery in Rome; and indirectly to the Countess Anna Laetitia Pecci Blunt. Rome, May 25th, 1937. One page, single-sided, on watermarked and ivory-colored paper. cm 20 x 29. In 16°. Perfect condition, except for usual folds.

Through this writing, Mino Maccari agrees to take part at the drawings exhibition in a Parisian gallery, organized by the Countess Pecci-Blunt. It deals with a young and promising Mino Maccari, already popular not only in Tuscany but throughout Italy as the satirical illustrator of “Il Selvaggio” and the irreverent journalist. For this reason he was called by the patron of arts, the Countess,  to show his artworks in a European context.

Mino Maccari (Siena, 1898 – Rome, 1989)

The popular Italian painter and engraver with a caustic personality, Mino Maccari, was called in 1924 by Angiolo Bencini to collaborate as illustrator for the magazine 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.

"More rude and harsh than the elegant Longanesi, but more “cultured" (although seemingly the opposite) for more straightforward roots in the Italian soul, Maccari's corrosive talent always hid in a blend of leisure and ferocity, a deep melancholy. Conscious of belonging to a rare race in extinction, he too, like Longanesi, groaned for not sobbing. His smirks, browsing the Selvaggio collection (1924-1943) are a chronicle of Italian and European evils. " With these words, Marcello Staglieno describes Mino Maccari.

The caustic personality of his writings is also found in his drawings, with which he portrayed a very controversial age.

Countess Anna Laetitia Pecci (Rome, 1885 - Marlia, 1971)

Best-known as "Mimì" Pecci-Blunt, the Italian noblewoman was an art collector, patron and nephew of Pope Leo XIII. Extremely volcanic, she was very active in the cultural field, opening numerous lounges, galleries (such as the Cometa Gallery in Rome nd after a branch in New York) and theaters. In 1919 she married Cecil Blumenthal, later changed to Blunt, a wealthy Jewish banker from New York, heir to an important collection of 19th-century French painting. Her Parisian and Roman salons was attended by artists and intellectuals of the caliber of Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvador Dalì, Paul Valery, Poulenc, Paul Claudel, Aldo Palazzeschi, Max Jacob and Victoria Ocampo!