Anselmo Bucci (1887 – 1955)
Il tempo del Novecento tra Italia e Europa

The exhibition itinerary in the exhibition notes

The artist

Anselmo Bucci (Fossombrone, 1887 – Monza, 1955) was one of the most complex, cultured, and independent artists of 20th-century Italy. Best known as a co-founder of the group of artists promoted by Margherita Sarfatti in the early 1920s, Bucci quickly asserted his independence and stood out for the distinctly European character of his artistic vision.
Born in Fossombrone, in Italy's Marche region, Bucci honed his skills between Veneto and Lombardy at the time of the first Venice Biennales, cultivating a strong foundation in figurative art and a persistent curiosity for international movements. In Paris, he came into contact with Symbolist and Post-Impressionist art; during World War I, he served as a war artist at the front; upon returning to Italy, he became a leading figure in the dialogue between tradition and modernity.
Alongside his painting, Bucci developed an engraver's practice of remarkable breadth and quality – especially in drypoint – and produced a substantial body of writing that helped define his profile as a European intellectual, able to reflect critically on his own era.
A hallmark of his artistic exploration was his deep knowledge of the Old Masters – a lifelong point of reference, as seen in his youthful self-portrait painted over a 17th-century canvas by Padovanino.
Like many great artists before him – including his admired Rembrandt and Van Gogh – Bucci was fascinated by self-portraiture, whether through swift graphite or drypoint sketches or more finished paintings. His desire to define and control his image even extended to works by other artists. In the bronze bust cast by his friend Angelo Biancini, Bucci – then in his fifties – retouched the pupils with a stroke of white paint.

Roots in the Marche Region

At times, the artist signed his works as "Bucci da Fossombrone," a testament to his enduring bond with his native Marche region.
After his family moved to Veneto – living first in Cittadella, then Este, and Padua – Anselmo spent his summer holidays back in Fossombrone with his grandparents. In this way, the Marche became a landscape of memories and childhood dreams, an evocative blend of affection, nostalgia, and colour impressions that Bucci would reimagine in one of his pivotal early paintings, Jeunesse, now known only from photographs and preparatory sketches.
In 1908, during a stay in Fossombrone, Bucci experimented with the Divisionist technique in landscapes such as La gola del Furlo (The Furlo Gorge) and Giardino marchigiano (Orto a Fossombrone) (Marche garden. Garden in Fossombrone).
The memory of summers spent in his hometown resurfaces powerfully in one of his Parisian masterpieces, L'Autunno (Autumn). Exhibited at the 1911 Salon des Artistes Français, the work was praised by critics, especially by Guillaume Apollinaire. In this painting, Bucci already demonstrates remarkable mastery in depicting the nude, set as the protagonist in a rural scene where, in the lower left corner, there is also a portrait of his painter friend Adulaire. This work combines a vibrant kaleidoscope of Post-Impressionist colour with a continuous dialogue with Old Master painting—a constant reference for the young artist, even after he moved to France.
From 1904 to 1906, Bucci lived in Monza with his family: his father Achille, a school inspector; his mother Sestilia; his older brother Giovanni, a future writer; and his younger sisters Emilia (known as Bigia), Anna, and Maria. Monza would always remain dear to the artist and is depicted in many of his paintings.

The Paris Years

Anselmo Bucci arrived in Paris in November 1906 with his friends Mario Buggelli and Leonardo Dudreville: "Altogether, we were fifty-eight years old, and between us, we had three suitcases, a single address, and twelve francs to our names."
He lived in Paris for eight years, but even after returning to Italy – and up until 1935 – he kept a studio there and maintained a close network of friends. Paris was where he found inspiration, matured, and established himself as an artist.
The early years were difficult but exciting. Bucci immersed himself in the bohemian world of La Ruche, a picturesque building in Montparnasse housing many artists' studios, where he met Gino Severini, Amedeo Modigliani, Lorenzo Viani, Pablo Picasso, Maurice Utrillo, and many others. He supported himself by retouching photographs, creating portraits, and producing drypoint etchings. Among them was a series of fifty plates titled Paris qui bouge (Paris in Motion), where he captured the Impressionist fascination with movement and shimmering light – rendered entirely in black and white.
Bucci lived and worked in Montmartre, capturing the bars and squares of the famous district with lively, sometimes caricatured paintings that blended Art Nouveau motifs with the bright colours of Post-Impressionism. The Montmartre hill inspired him to paint numerous aerial views – a central theme in his work, even after his return to Italy.
He had a passionate relationship with Juliette Maré, who often posed for him – sometimes elegantly dressed, sometimes exotically in Japanese attire – in what became some of his most striking and accomplished early works.

On the Road

By 1909, Bucci was already an established artist, working as a portraitist, illustrator, and engraver. His relationship with Juliette Maré and his newfound financial stability encouraged him to broaden his horizons. His first journey was with his friend Adulaire, from Normandy. He visited Rouen – the birthplace of his beloved Flaubert – and captured its medieval architecture in a series of engravings. A few months later, he travelled to the south of France with Juliette, who posed in a blooming garden for Inverno in riviera (Winter on the Riviera) – one of Bucci's early masterpieces.
The warm, vibrant colours of the Mediterranean captivated his palette and inspired him to explore the effects of light and new landscape motifs.
In the spring of 1912, the couple visited Sardinia, where Bucci's father had worked many years earlier. As a child, Anselmo found the local crafts and dolls his father sent home to Fossombrone exotic and mysterious. This journey marked Bucci's desire to escape city life and seek out ancient lands and traditions—an experience he recorded in his diary and expressed through paintings and engravings.
The following year, he travelled to Brittany, a trip documented in a notebook now housed at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Pont-Aven. From these notes, he created colourful landscapes and portraits of the local people.
Anselmo and Juliette also visited Algeria, Juliette's birthplace. Bucci was captivated by the Arab architecture, bustling markets, and the beauty of the desert, all of which became subjects in works he created between 1912 and 1914.

An artist at the front

When World War I broke out, Anselmo Bucci returned to Italy and showed his work in Florence at the Exhibition of Italians Returned to Their Homeland. In June 1915, he enlisted in the Battaglione Lombardo Volontari Ciclisti Automobilisti – famous for its "platoon of artists," which counted Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Achille Funi, Mario Sironi, Antonio Sant'Elia, Carlo Erba, Ugo Piatti, and Luigi Russolo among its members.
The war became one of the most transformative periods in Bucci's personal and artistic journey. After nearly a decade immersed in French literary and artistic culture, the war gave Bucci the chance to reconnect with his homeland – an adventure perfectly suited to his restless spirit.
Unable to bring his painting supplies to the front, Bucci produced a prolific body of drawings – particularly in charcoal – capturing the everyday life of soldiers. During periods of leave, Bucci worked in his Milan studio, overlooking the tracks of Central Station and shared with his friend Leonardo Dudreville, using these sketches as inspiration for paintings and engravings that he exhibited in group shows devoted to wartime themes.
His work as a war painter and engraver boosted Bucci's reputation in Italy and led to new connections with gallery owners and patrons like Lino Pesaro and Achille Nardi Beltrame. Although Bucci had returned to Italy as an artist shaped by French innovation, his wartime work established him as a chronicler and interpreter of Italian life.

Graphic works

In 1936, Bucci compiled an inventory listing an impressive 6,910 drawings and 417 engraved plates, in addition to numerous sketchbooks. By 1954, a catalogue of his engravings, compiled by Carlo Alberto Petrucci, director of the National Chalcography in Rome, listed 697 graphic works.
Unfortunately, much of this vast body of work has been dispersed, except for significant groups of engravings that Bucci donated to the Civica Raccolta delle Stampe Achille Bertarelli in Milan and the Quadreria Cesarini in Fossombrone.
When Bucci arrived in Paris, he was already an exceptionally talented draftsman and illustrator, quick to spot the commercial potential of drypoint etching. With this technique, he captured scenes of Parisian life as well as moments from his travels in Normandy, Brittany, Sardinia, and North Africa.
He collaborated with leading Parisian publishers, who commissioned him to create large engravings of monuments in Paris and Versailles. These were years of intense experimentation with colour etching, as artists' and printers' responded to the new creative horizons opened by colour photography. Bucci's prints, masterclasses in technical skill, captured the luminous effects of Impressionist painting on the etched plate.
In Italy, however, the print market was far less thriving. As a result, Bucci's output of engravings diminished considerably, as he focused mainly on personal works produced in small editions or a few commissioned pieces, such as portraits and book illustrations.
Bucci's drawings from the 1920s and 1930s reveal an impressive variety of techniques, formats, and purposes, from quick pencil notes to meticulous preparatory cartoons. Together, these works confirm his place as one of the most gifted and prolific draftsmen of early 20th-century Italy.

From the window

In his Italian Journey, Goethe – a writer Bucci greatly admired – suggested that upon arriving in a new city, one should climb its highest tower to take in the view from above.
Whether consciously or not, Bucci embraced this principle throughout his career. He favoured homes and studios in elevated locations that offered sweeping views. Looking down over the landscape became one of his favourite pastimes, inspiring paintings like Tetti di Parigi (Rooftops of Paris), where snow and fog transform the cityscape into a grey landscape of the soul.
The postwar construction boom in Milan became a new and fascinating subject for him. From the balcony of his studio on Via Jean Jaurès, overlooking the tracks of Central Station, Bucci watched the countryside slowly give way to the expanding city.
He studied the city's changing landscape through sketches, often based on photographs, which became the backdrop for reflections on the dramas of contemporary life. L'addio (The Farewell) shows a woman waving her handkerchief as she bids farewell to the train carrying recruits to the front. Her figure seems to merge with the landscape, a rare homage by Bucci to Futurism. A similar cityscape sets the scene for the funeral procession of a fallen soldier in Funerali dell'eroe (Funeral of a Hero), while Funerali di un anarchico (Funeral of an Anarchist) unfolds in Rome on a sombre, rain-soaked day.
Of all Bucci's cityscapes, Il Lampo, (The Lightening), shown at the 1922 Venice Biennale, stands out. The calm of Milan's suburbs is suddenly shattered by a bolt of lightning that startles horses and sends passers-by hurrying home, a stark reminder of how quickly the tranquillity of daily life can be upended by forces beyond our control.

Portraits

Bucci's fascination with portraiture began in his childhood in Este, where he watched his first teacher, Francesco Salvini, depict members of the local bourgeoisie – an artist who, as Bucci noted, "worked from photographs and painted true likenesses". Between 1904 and 1906, before turning twenty, Bucci honed his skills by inviting friends he met in Monza and Brera to sit for him.
His Paris diaries reveal that portrait painting, more than exhibiting at the Salons, enabled him to form connections that would prove crucial to his professional success.
Likewise, back in Italy, Bucci used portraiture to build relationships with Milan's bourgeoisie. In 1918, for example, he painted Velia Pesaro, daughter of gallery owner Lino Pesaro, who would later become his principal sales representative. This work echoes his grand Ritratto di signora in blu (Portrait of a Lady in Blue), in which Bucci reinterprets the 19th-century convention of a full-length figure seated in an armchair, enlivened with Post-Impressionist colour accents.
In other emotionally charged works, he adopted the frontal, half-length pose, reminiscent of a photographic postcard. Notable examples include Anita, the portrait of painter Cipriano Efisio Oppo, and Elena Fambri, with whom Bucci shared a close relationship in the early 1920s.
Among his works from this period, Rosa Rodrigo (La Bella) stands out for its quality and sensuality, a modern reinterpretation of the "windowsill portrait" tradition, masterfully explored by Raphael and Rembrandt.

The age of Novecento

Anselmo Bucci was one of the founding members of the Novecento group (later Novecento Italiano), supported by the critic and journalist Margherita Sarfatti, who sought to restore, after the profound upheaval of the avant-garde, a tradition of Italian art rooted in "modern classicism".
Though often seen as being on the fringes of the movement, Bucci brought a distinctly personal vision, blending his international experience with a deep appreciation for the old masters. His style was notably free and eclectic, embracing a wide range of interests from engraving to decoration, making it difficult to confine his work within the boundaries of any single movement.
For example, the solid, synthetic volumes championed by Sarfatti coexist in his work with enduring Post-Impressionist influences, vibrant atmospheres, and scenes often painted en plein air. This is evident in I Pittori (The Painters), presented at the 1924 Venice Biennale, a true manifesto of the Novecento group: Bucci depicts himself frescoing the walls of a church, set against the radiant backdrop of his native Fossombrone. The painting affirms the "return to craft", one of the defining hallmarks of 20th-century art.
This craftsmanship is also conveyed through innovative and virtuosic use of perspective. Works like Odeon, a group portrait of Parisian friends composed with an elliptical perspective; I Giocolieri (The Jugglers) a troupe of acrobats caught in the midst of daring, complex poses; La scuola (The School) which depicts the artist's sister's class of young students arranged within a strict perspectival framework, all showcase this mastery.
Bucci's skill with perspective is also clear in Gli amanti sorpresi (The Surprised Lovers), his modern take on the myth of Venus and Mars discovered by Vulcan, where, with a touch of irony, he paints himself catching the two lovers in the act.

Nature and Animals

Anselmo Bucci's fascination with the animal world was first and foremost personal and emotional. While in Paris, he adopted two wolfdog puppies, which he captured in drawings and etchings. He named them Baloo – after the bear from The Jungle Book – and Loute.
In 1918, he honoured a Rembrandt masterpiece he had seen years earlier in Amsterdam by painting a resplendent Peacock. Later, in his Milan apartment, he kept a turtle, nicknamed La Pupa, and a goose named Gertrude, in honour of a character from The Betrothed. Gertrude starred in one of his most playful canvases, Le oche del Campidoglio (The Geese of the Capitol), where Bucci poked fun at a theme from Roman history favoured by Fascist propaganda.
Around 1924, perhaps through his friend, the painter Ettore Cosomati, who lived in London, Bucci connected with Rudyard Kipling and began creating drypoint illustrations for The Jungle Book. The artist visited the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to study exotic plants and animals from life, capturing their unique features and subtle differences between species with remarkable accuracy. "These monkeys are Indian monkeys, not the usual kind... I had to go out and find them to illustrate this plate for Kipling", Bucci recalled.
This suite of illustrations for The Jungle Book, published in just ten copies in 1925, became one of Bucci's engraving masterpieces and earned him international acclaim: it was shown at the 1926 Venice Biennale and added to Kipling's private collection.
Alongside this project, Bucci worked on other animal-themed pieces, which allowed him to break away from the typical subjects of the Novecento group. The masterpiece of this series is Uscita dall'Arca (Exit from the Ark), a virtuosic kaleidoscope of animal life, exhibited at the 1928 Venice Biennale and translated into an engraving that same year.

The 1930s

The 1930s marked a pivotal turning point in Anselmo Bucci's career. After his Parisian period, the war, and his involvement with the Novecento group, Bucci felt the need for new inspiration.
His break from Margherita Sarfatti's group, driven perhaps by political disagreements, but above all by his determination to defend his artistic independence, cost him many public commissions tied to the regime. As Ugo Nebbia aptly put it, Bucci then led an "amphibious Franco-Milanese life". He split his time between Paris, Milan, and increasingly frequent travels across Europe, from which he brought back travel writings, drawings, and small panel sketches.
In 1930, Bucci published Il pittore volante, a collection of aphorisms that was a major success and won the inaugural Viareggio Prize, cementing his reputation as a writer.
In his painting, he favoured lesser subjects – flowers, animals, landscapes – a choice that critics of the time interpreted as a return to "Impressionism."
At the 1936 Venice Biennale, he presented two large canvases on the theme of interior portraiture: Il violoncellista Gilberto Crepax (The cellist Gilberto Crepax) and Il Thè (The Tea), in which the model poses nude before the window of the artist's Milanese studio.
During this period, Bucci's relationship with Giuseppe Cesarini, the notary from Fossombrone, grew stronger. An amateur painter and refined collector, Cesarini began acquiring Bucci's works and, in 1934, commissioned his own portrait from the artist. This relationship led to the idea of a house-museum intended to showcase the best of contemporary Italian painting. Bucci's work held pride of place there: in the 1940s and 1950s – partly due to hardship and war damage – he devoted many of his remaining paintings to the collection.
After Cesarini's death in 1977, the collection was transferred to the Municipality of Fossombrone and today forms the most extensive collection of Anselmo Bucci's works.

Epilogue. I Maschi

In 1945, the artist selected what he considered his most important works, such as I Pittori, Gli amanti sorpresi, Odeon and Rosa Rodrigo, for the monograph dedicated to him by publisher Görlich.
Yet one major work is conspicuously absent from this volume: I Maschi (The Males), his most imposing canvas and the result of a decade-long artistic pursuit.
In a 1910 article, journalist Sarti wrote that the young Bucci was preparing new, grand compositions in his Montparnasse studio to accompany L'Autunno, which had been successfully exhibited at the Salon that year: "Autunno belongs to the decorative genre (...) but he has planned four other monumental works, one of which is already sketched". That monumental sketch was, in fact, I Maschi, as confirmed by a 1911 photograph showing the painting alongside L'Autunno and Inverno in riviera.
The canvas depicts a battle of the sexes: men of various ages, naked and ravenous, attack a group of Amazons, who defend themselves with bows and arrows. The preparatory sketches, created between 1910 and 1911, feature vibrant tones that soften the drama of the subject, resulting in a pleasing and decorative composition. Perhaps due to the scale of the canvas, changing times, or the looming threat of war, Bucci abandoned the project for over a decade. In 1920, a pencil drawing attests to Bucci's renewed interest in the painting, which he completely repainted and reworked between 1921 and 1922. The new version, darker and more concise, embraced a distinctly Novecento style. Bucci considered exhibiting it at the 1924 Venice Biennale, in the gallery of the Six Painters of the Novecento, but opted instead for smaller works.
The artist kept the painting throughout his life, managing to save it from destruction during the bombing of his Milan studio in World War II, an event he later remembered with bitter irony in the canvas titled Il dono americano (The American Gift).