Alberto Savinio

Alberto Savinio real name Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico (25 August 1891 – 5 May 1952) was an Italian writer, painter, musician, journalist, essayist, playwright, set designer and composer. He was the younger brother of 'metaphysical' painter Giorgio de Chirico. His work often dealt with philosophical and psychological themes, and he also was heavily concerned with the philosophy of art.
Throughout his life, Savinio composed five operas and authored at least forty-seven books, including multiple autobiographies and memoirs. Savinio also extensively wrote and produced works for the theater. Savinio's work received mixed reviews during his lifetime, often due to his pervasive use of surrealism. He was influenced by and a contemporary of Apollinaire, Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and Fernand Léger.Wikipedia

 Between 1905 and 1910 his family resides in Monaco, where Savinio continues the musical studies already initiated in Greece. With his brother is formed on the theses of the thinkers most stimulating of the moment (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Bergson). Between 1910 and 1915, he has many contacts with Paris and becomes a close friend of Guillaume Apollinaire, through whose magazine meets Picasso, Picabia, Brancusi, Jacob, Cocteau and Cendrars. All this environment modeling their critical spirit and conditions your choice in literature of the grotesque and the absurd. Throw a musical stream called Sincerismo, which Apollinaire interpreted as a transposition into music of De Chirico's metaphysical painting. In Ferrara he meets his brother Giorgio, De Pisis, Carrà and later Morandi; the union of these artists is called school metaphysics in 1916. At the end of the war is set in Milan and then in Rome, where they meet a group of artists around Mario Broglio and his magazine Valori Plastici.En 1926, installed in Paris, Jean Cocteau makes the presentation of a wide exhibition in the Gallery Berheim, (...)which already shows a mature and highly personal, language although you will notice a certain dependence of Chirico in his references to classical mythology reviewed... Savinio painting is an exercise in memory, but on the canvas memories are associated with shadows of dream and the ghosts of the imagination (...) (Fonti). Until the year 1932 it has contact with the Surrealists. Later, Savinio will declare that its surrealism (...)not content to represent review it and express the unconscious but he wants to give shape to the report and awareness to the unconscious (...).He began to exhibit in Italy in 1932 and obtains a success making it to settle in Milan. At the end of the 1930s paints portraits with a wise psychological inquiry. In 1948 he actively began his collaboration with La Scala in Milan as a stage designer. It is interested in the idea of metamorphosis.He died in Rome on May 5, 1952.(thebiography.us)