Exhibition of the week Tullio Crali: A Futurist Life
Estorick Collection, London N1 (020-7704 9522, estorickcollection.com). Until 11 April
The Italian futurist painter Tullio Crali (1910-2000) captured the “exhilaration” of flying like no other, said Maggie Gray in Apollo magazine. Futurism, an avantgarde movement founded in Italy in 1909, celebrated speed, technology and modernity – the car, the train, the plane and, at times, industrialised warfare. Crali had a “remarkable capacity for translating the power and drama of flight into paint”. Yet he remains relatively unrecognised, perhaps because of his “enthusiasm for militarised flight”; though he shied away from politics, he made some of his best known paintings as a war artist in Mussolini’s Italy, and the “uncomfortably close” links between Italian fascism and futurism have meant that his work has seldom been exhibited since 1945. This new exhibition at the Estorick Collection is the first survey of Crali’s work ever to be held in the UK, and suggests that he should be regarded as one of the greats of 20th century Italian art. With a wide selection of thrilling, rarely seen paintings, the show traces Crali’s career from the 1920s to the 1980s and invites us to reconsider the achievements of a singularly talented artist.
Crali was a generation younger than the most famous futurist artists, such as Umberto Boccioni, but he took aerial painting to
new heights, said Lucy Davies in The Daily Telegraph. Drawing on his “first-hand experience” – he flew regularly with both an airline and a fighter squadron – he produced “thrillingly real” evocations of flying. Upside Down Loop
(Death Loop) (1938), for instance, is a vision of a pilot’s view from the open cockpit of an upturned plane, the cityscape below heaving towards us “in stomachlurching fashion”; the vertigoinducing Before the Parachute
Opens (1939), has a figure “trapped in the few surreal seconds after he has leapt from the plane door”. Crali was not a committed fascist – in fact he was deemed a “subversive” by the Nazis. But he remained fascinated by flight and aesthetically devoted to futurism all his life.
Crali was equally accomplished when depicting more terrestrial subjects, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. The Forces
of the Bend (1930), an extraordinary vision of a speeding red sports car rounding a corner that he painted when he was just 20, is considerably “more sophisticated than anything by his contemporaries”, while a 1930 landscape of Ostia in the evening sun might just be the “most beautiful scene Crali ever painted”. This is an altogether “riveting” exhibition that “surprises from first to last”: a “head-on revelation”.