Village by Antoine GIANELLI 1896 - 1983

oil on wood measuring 50cm x 65cm plus wood stick
signed lower right
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.
Born to a sailor father from Ile-Rousse and a mother from Ajaccio, he showed a very early predisposition for drawing and painting. 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 shore of the Old Port. He was then a very poor painter who, like the sailors of Marseilles, wore Shanghai blue. It was during this period that he frequented the movement of young Marseilles painters, Antoine Serra, Louis Toncini, and François Diana in the progressive movements of the Peintres Prolétariens, which later became Peintres du Peuple.
In his paintings, irradiated with light, Gianelli takes care of the colors that he gathers in simple scenes with harmonious chords, following the approach of André Derain, for whom "the great danger of Art is the excess of culture". Gianelli works modestly, without fuss.
It is customary to divide the work of this Provencal artist into two periods:
Gianelli young, dynamic and adventurous, master of a grandiose work, on the scale of the frescoists of the Quattrocento, carried out mainly in the French overseas territories, before the last world conflict. He was able to make these trips thanks to a scholarship obtained in 1922. Between 1924 and 1930, he was in the Congo, the West Indies, Cuba and Haiti. From 1931 to 1934, he was in Guadeloupe where he received commissions to decorate the interiors of several public and religious buildings, including the parish church of Saint André in Morne-à-l'Eau, the Chamber of Agriculture in Pointe-à-Pitre, and 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 moved to Madagascar where he also decorated public buildings, including the town hall of Tamatave (today Toamasina). Surprised by the war, Antoine Gianelli did not return to France until 1946.
Gianelli softened, after the break of the war years, leaving a final time, in 1952, on the call of a wise administrator, to Madagascar, then definitely back in his hometown in 1963 to compose a work of easel (still lifes, nudes, Provencal landscapes).
In Marseille, he frequented the "Péano painters", a new bohemian generation that had settled in the Arcenaulx, the neighborhood where he began, and which included, among others, Pierre Ambrogiani, Antoine Ferrari, Hubert Aicardi, Arsène Sari, Jo Berto, René Seyssaud, Auguste Chabaud, Louis Toncini, François Diana, Antoine Serra. As he had been doing since 1958 when he received a silver medal, he continued to exhibit at the Salon des Artistes Français until 19818.
The city of Marseille dedicated a retrospective exhibition to Antoine Gianelli at the Musée du Vieux Marseille from November 1981 to February 1982, one year before his death.

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