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Crapshoothers |
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His attention to the figure and to
color led Sassu to create his series of red men. In 1929-30 the role of protagonist of his
canvases is taken by the same figures whom we find in his interpretations of the
contemporary urban landscape painted at the same time. Men rolling dice, soccer players, Dioscuri, Argonauts, cyclists, all are
distinguished by the color red: a deliberately antinaturalistic choice that placed him in
open opposition to Novecento chromatic tendencies and that conservative critics saw as
debatable excess, for which Futurist experimentation was no longer an excuse since Sassu
had by then moved away from it.
In reality this solution must be seen as a continuation of
that search for the modern which came to him precisely from the Futurist group: in pictures like Man and City Outskirts, Apparitions, The Blue Horse the brief, synthesized passages of landscape have just those colors
of the outskirts of Milan which the artist saw all around him. |
