 Manetti
Fernando
(between the late artists Omar Onsi & Rachid
Wehbi)
Né à
San Giminiano (Italie) en 1899, Fernando Manetti y avait fait des
études de peinture. Spécialiste de la fresque, il
était venu à Jérusalem, à la fin des
années trente, pour y réaliser des peintures religieuses.
Interné en Palestine par les autorités anglaises en
tant que sujet italien au début de la Seconde Guerre mondiale,
il finit par s'installer au Liban et enseigna la peinture à
l'Académie libanaise des beaux-arts, ainsi que dans des cours
privés.
Michel
Fani – Dictionnaire de la Peinture au Liban – Edition de l’escalier
1998
Manetti
Fernando by William MATAR
Fernando Manetti was born in 1899 at San Giminiano, Italy, and took
up the study of painting there, specializing in fresco. Towards
the end of the ‘thirties he came to Jerusalem to execute religious
works. During World War II, being an Italian, he was interned by
the British authorities and afterwards settled in Lebanon, teaching
art at the Académie libanaise des beaux-arts and giving private
lessons. Influenced by the Siennese school and by Cézanne,
without being a whole-hearted modernist, Manetti introduced a different
approach where exuberant color was demanded. Reaction to impressionism
implied a strictly formal analysis and clear structures.
For Manetti, honest art and sensation ended with Cézanne.
Structure was primordial to color, dissection preceded construction,
and outline was to be done with the brush. He looked not for sensation
but for expression of form. His successors went to Paris to learn
a kind of neo-cubism to construct the canvas, while in fact they
were intellectually trying to deconstruct the western canvas in
an effort to understand it.
Manetti at least helped Lebanese painters to find the appropriate
questions, even if he did not help provide the answers. For learning
to paint, no particular theory seemed to him of much use. After
having devoted all his time to teaching, he exhibited in 1963 at
the Bristol Hotel and was preparing another show in Italy when on
March 18th, 1964 he died in Beirut.
In the work of Manetti there is a poetic realism, with the feeling
lightened by the transparency of the support and the touch. At ALBA
he had represented a style contrasting with that of Gemayel, transparent
color with one and thickness of the oils with another. Gemayel delighted
in color and form while for Manetti the exuberance of life was set
off by the deliberate desire for purification of forms and for fidelity
to the Italian tradition of painting, where joy comes from blending
and skill in intimation. Gemayel appeared as the ultimate in impressionism
in an art that could not go beyond the simple pleasure of painting
and of mixing colors.
Manetti showed the same taste for forms and for women in his own
life. His exactitude came from the demand for an art that excluded
any exuberance that was foreseeable and largely facile. He had behind
him the twofold tradition of Italy and of training in rigor and
sought to avoid plunging into an ill-ordered baroque, preferring
order. This was no doubt what attracted most of his pupils to him,
both sides wishing to put order into the visible world.
Danse - 73 x 90 cm
Nue 24 x 10
Nue 30 x 13
Nue 30 x 13
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