A. Gianelli (1896-1983), Large Reclining Nude, Oil On Panel Signed On The Left, Framed

Antoine Marius Gianelli is a French painter-traveler, of Corsican origin, born in Marseille on August 28, 1896 and died in the same city on March 23, 1983. Trained by Marius Guindon at the School of Fine Arts in Marseille, he then became a student of Jean-Paul Laurens and Fernand Cormon in Paris. After the First World War, he settled in the Rive Neuve district on the south bank of the Old Port. He was then a very poor painter who, like the Marseille sailors, wore Shanghai blue. This was the time when he frequented the young Marseille painting, Antoine Serra, Louis Toncini; or François Diana in the progressive movements of the Proletarian Painters who later became Painters of the People. In his paintings, irradiated with light, Gianelli takes care with the colors that he brings together in simple scenes with harmonious accords. It is customary to divide the work of this Provençal artist into two periods: Gianelli young, dynamic and adventurous, master of a grandiose work, on the scale of the fresco painters of the Quattrocento, produced mainly in the French overseas territories, before the last world conflict. These trips, he was able to accomplish them thanks to a scholarship obtained in 1922. Between 1924 and 1930, we find him in Congo, the Antilles, Cuba and Haiti. From 1931 to 1934, he was in Guadeloupe where he received commissions to ensure the interior decoration of several public and religious buildings, including the parish church of Saint André de Morne-à-l'Eau, the chamber of agriculture of Pointe-à-Pitre, the town hall of Marie-Galante. The links that Antoine Gianelli established with the Ministry of Colonies allowed him to participate in the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 and the Universal Exhibition of 1937 where he decorated the pavilions of Guadeloupe, the Islands, Provence and the Navy. In 1938, he went to Madagascar where he also decorated public buildings, including the town hall of Tamatave (now Toamasina). Surprised by the war, Antoine Gianelli did not return to France until 1946. Gianelli calmed down after the break of the war years, leaving one last time in 1952, at the request of a knowledgeable administrator, for Madagascar, then definitively returned to his hometown in 1963 to compose an easel work (still lifes, nudes, Provençal landscapes). In Marseille, he frequented the "painters of Péano", a new bohemian generation who settled in Les Arcenaux, the district where he started out, and who included, among others, Pierre Ambrogiani, Antoine Ferrari, Hubert Aicardi, Arsène Sari, René Seyssaud, Auguste Chabaud, Louis Toncini, François Diana, Antoine Serra. As he had already been doing since 1958 when he had received a silver medal, he continued to exhibit at the Salon des Artistes Français until 19818. The city of Marseille dedicated a retrospective to Antoine Gianelli at the Musée du Vieux Marseille from November 1981 to February 1982, a year before his death.