The driving force of the gallery was Carlo Cardazzo. The man was a visionary and presented many great italian and foreign artists in his gallery at the San Marco square in Venice. The importance of the gallery was recognized by the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation who organised an exhibition aroud Cardazzo and his galleria del Cavallino in 2008
The distinctive component of Cardazzo’s new vision of art was his precocious realization of the importance of networking and collaboration that would mark the art world of the future. On 25 April 1942, on the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice, he inaugurated the celebrated Galleria del Cavallino, in the same year that Peggy Guggenheim opened her New York museum-gallery Art of This Century. In 1946, he opened the Galleria del Naviglio in the center of Milan, initiating a series of relations with critics and intellectuals, travelling constantly between Europe and the USA, bringing together artists of different generations as well as avant-garde architects, and printing outstanding publications that projected the image of his persona to the wider public. He was the first dealer to contract Lucio Fontana, after Fontana’s return from Argentina, and it was for the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan that Fontana conceived his Spatial Ambience with Black Light.
Cardazzo was a creative powerhouse of the art world, a beacon to collectors, museum directors and gallerists. Peggy Guggenheim herself acknowledged his central position in promoting the new avant-gardes. They shared several of their concerns for modern art: the promotion of American art, their dedication to the historic avant-gardes, to Kurt Schwitters, Joan Miró, Sonia Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Giacomo Balla, Vasily Kandinsky, artists whom Cardazzo exhibited several times, sometimes with Guggenheim’s help, while he in turn brought to her attention artists whose work was to enter her collection. From the time of her arrival in Venice, Guggenheim sustained a dialogue with Cardazzo that was dense with contacts, proposals and exchanges of opinion about artists and movements: works by Victor Brauner, Matta, Emilio Vedova and Asger Jorn were purchased by Guggenheim from Cardazzo, and still belong to her Venetian museum. Again, it was due to Cardazzo that Guggenheim discovered and patronized Tancredi Parmeggiani, Giuseppe Santomaso, and Vinicio Vianello. Postwar art, especially Italian, concludes Guggenheim’s journey of discovery of the artistic avant-gardes that she had begun in London in 1938.
FTN Books has acquired a small collection of Galleria del Cavallino that will be on sale in the coming months. For more information inquire at www.ftnbooksandart@gmail.com
In the next 3 days an overview of the publications that will be for sale are presented. Here is part 1:
