Guglielmo Achille Cavellini

After the marriage and the birth of their first daughter Adele in 1900, they moved to Switzerland where the father worked as a bricklayer, then became a hawker in Lombardy.

They lived for some time in Arona, on the Lake Maggiore, where in 1911 their son Mario was born.

Then they moved to Brescia, where they opened a store called Bazar 33.

Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (11 September 1914 – 20 November 1990), also known as GAC, was an Italian artist and art collector.

Guglielmo Achille Cavellini was born in Brescia on 11 September 1914.

His parents were from Tuscany, coming from two small villages over Pontremoli, in the Lunigiana.

In 1918 Adele died from the Spanish flu.

Cavellini studied for nine years at the Cesare Arici Jesuit college.

At 16 years he started the Istituto tecnico, but he was forced to interrupt his studies to help his parents in the store.

Since his childhood he drew and painted, mainly landscapes.

In 1935 he met Lisetta, his first girlfriend and future wife.

In 1938 in Cortina d'Ampezzo he befriended the painter Domenico Mucci, who gave him painting lessons.

After his initial activity as a painter, in the 1940s and 1950s, he became one of the major collectors of contemporary Italian abstract art, developing a deep relationship of patronage and friendship with the artists.

In 1941 Cavellini was conscripted in the Second World War, and was sent to an anti-aircraft base in Bergamo.

On 11 August 1941 he married Lisetta, then was dismissed from the army because of a peptic ulcer.

On 10 September 1942 his daughter Mariella was born, and then Cavellini went back to the army until the end of the war.

From 1945 to 1948 he drew and painted frequently.

In the same period he visited the Feroldi collection, which included The Disquieting Muses by Giorgio de Chirico, the Lying Nude by Amedeo Modigliani, and works by Giorgio Morandi, Henri Rousseau, André Derain, Alfred Sisley and Paul Cézanne.

He also visited Venice, where he painted landscapes, and Burano, where he met the painter Filippo De Pisis.

At the Procuratie, in front of the Tempest by Giorgione, he met artist Emilio Vedova.

Vedova proposed to organize an exhibition in Cavellini's house, with the help of painter Giuseppe Santomaso and art critics Giuseppe Marchiori and Marco Valsecchi.

The exhibition was successful, and many young artists contacted Cavellini to ask him to show their works.

Among them was Renato Birolli, whom Cavellini befriended and from whom he acquired the 86 Drawings of the Resistance and the painting The Woman and the Moon.

In December of the same year Birolli and Ennio Morlotti traveled to Paris on a scholarship of the French government.

On 4 February 1946 Cavellini's son Piero was born.

In June 1947 Cavellini met them in Paris with his wife, and there he visited the main museums of the city (the Louvre, the Petit Palais, the Jeu de Paume), the art galleries and the studios of artists Gino Severini, Óscar Domínguez, Édouard Pignon and Henry Adam.

He was disheartened by the comparison to the great artists of the past and present, so he decided to abandon painting and work full-time on his commercial activity and on his collection.

In the same year he acquired two paintings by Renato Guttuso, and in March 1948 he traveled to Rome because one of his paintings was exhibited at the Rome Quadriennale in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Valle Giulia.

There he met Guttuso, whom he befriended, and art critic and historian Lionello Venturi who had just returned to Italy after his exile during Fascism.

At the end of 1949, and then again in 1951, he traveled to Paris to acquire works by Hans Hartung, Maurice Estève, Alfred Manessier, Jean René Bazaine, Gustave Singier, Pierre Tal-Coat, Jean Le Moal, Léon Gischia and Gérard Ernest Schneider.

Meanwhile, the family store enjoyed great success and expanded, changing its name from Bazar 33 to Grandi Magazzini 33.

Venturi recognized the importance of Cavellini's work and in 1953 published an article about him in the daily newspaper La Stampa.

Because of his sudden popularity, Cavellini's father and brother, who was president of the chamber of commerce of the province of Brescia, asked him to avoid contact with artists because they were afraid they might be communists.

Despite this Cavellini kept collecting art and visiting artists in Rome in the weekends, especially the home of Guttuso and his studio in the park of Villa Massimo.

There he met the artists of the Group of Eight (Afro Basaldella, Antonio Corpora, Giulio Turcato, Alberto Burri, Corrado Cagli, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Pietro Consagra, Nino Franchina, Leoncillo Leonardi and Mimmo Rotella) and acquired many of their works, among them Sacco e nero 3 by Burri.

At the following Rome Quadriennale Cavellini bought numerous works by abstract artists like Franchina, Consagra, Corpora and Capogrossi.

This experience has its pinnacle in the exhibition Modern painters of the Cavellini collection at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 1957.

He also authored the books Abstract Art (1959), Man painter (1960), Diary of Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (1975), Encounters/Clashes in the Jungle of Art (1977) and Life of a Genius (1989).

In the 1960s Cavellini resumed his activity as an artist, with an ample production spanning from Neo-Dada to performance art to mail art, of which he became one of the prime exponents with the Exhibitions at Home and the Round Trip works.

In 1971 he invented autostoricizzazione (self-historicization), upon which he acted to create a deliberate popular history surrounding his existence.