(Verona 1905–1959 Milan)
Taxi rosso nella neve (Red taxi in the snow), 1932, signed and dated 32, oil on canvas, 56 x 48 cm, framed

Provenance:
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Milan, Il Chiarismo. Omaggio a De Rocchi. Luce e colore a Milano negli anni Trenta, Palazzo Reale, 16 June-5 September 2010, exh. cat. p. 112, no. 54 with ill.
Turin, Renato Birolli. Figure e luoghi 1930–1959, Museo Ettore Fico, 10 March-26 June 2016, exh. cat. cover ill.

Literature:
C. Vanzetto, I colori degli angeli impacciati. Evanescenze romantiche dagli anni 30, nel clima neoclassico di Novecento, in “Corriere della Sera”, Milan, 15 June 2010, p. 19 with ill.

In the years that followed Renato Birolli’s (1905-1959) arrival in Milan in 1928, fresh from the Academy, his attention was captured by the circle of young artists (from Lucio Fontana to Sassu) who orbited around Edoardo Perisco, the first and foremost of Birolli’s critics.
Perisco read and lent the artists books by Maritain, from the “Roseau d’Or” series, and by Péguy. The sermo humilis, which tended to reproduce common parlance, is indeed typical of Péguy, with a deliberately naive narrative style, basic syntax, and rhythm characterised by continual repetition, like a nursery rhyme.
This same “naive” realisation of sacred themes, of landscapes, tinged with an evangelical spirit of infancy, can be found in Birolli’s work. The taxi limping along in the snow in this painting is anything but beautiful; it is even slightly awkward, yet also immersed in the ethereal grace of worldly things. And, Birolli seems to say, it is this same awkwardness which characterises us all: it is a rediscovery of the everyday through the lens of childhood.
The turmoil of the Milanese environment, depicted with differing, intimate views by all those who found themselves plunged into its mishaps, was Birolli’s opportunity to make the acquaintance of what were then the young avant-garde.
The brilliant artist and publisher Ernesto Treccani formed a group under the name Corrente (or Current), after the eponymous journal launched in 1938.
Corrente, which was also managed by Ernesto Treccani, swiftly developed its own collective action. It soon became the organ of the opposition comprising the Milanese-Florentine intelligentsia, and also obviously that of the eponymous artistic and cultural movement, represented by Raffaele De Grada, Giansiro Ferrata, Luciano Anceschi, Birolli himself and by the so-called Hermetic “purists” such as Bo, Luzi and Bigongiari.