Biography
Gerardo Dottori (*1884 Perugia IT | †1977 Perugia IT) was a major figure of the second wave of the Futurist Movement. He, along with a group of artists, developed aeropainting as a result of the new perspective on the world brought through flight. In Dottorri’s work, the landscape was synthesized and harmonized to create utopian lyrical forms reminiscent of his native landscape from above.
Dottori was born in Perugia, the Umbrian capital, and studied at the city’s Accademia di Belle Arti, where he revealed himself to be an accomplished draughtsman. Around 1904 he began to experiment with Divisionism, Italy’s distinctive response to Neo-Impressionism, which introduced a newfound sense of spontaneity and exuberance into his art. It liberated him from the restrictions of his academic training. In this period, you can already see his aptitude for luminous and animistic landscapes whose sinuous lines would become a hallmark of his aeropaintings.
In 1911, he moved to Rome and met the artist Filippo Marinetti who was the founder of the Futurist Movement. Dottori’s rebellious temperament made him naturally receptive to the subversive spirit of Marinetti’s movement, which he joined in the following year. The leap from the Symbolist works to the abstract and often-geometric experimentation of Dottori’s early Futurist works is significant. Futurism is most closely associated with its celebration of the flux and dynamism of the modern industrial age – which permeates Dottori’s imagery. The fragmentation of light in these works recalled earlier Futurist works but the subjects, perspectives, and techniques were new and singular to Dottori. He was deeply attached to his native region of Umbria and its lush, undulating landscape became his main subject. He frequently expressed his preference for ‘the stillness of the countryside and the mountains to the deafening noise of big cities. Whilst this might seem a paradoxical stance for a Futurist to adopt, the movement in fact offered artists significant latitude in their interpretation of its ideas, prizing innovation and creative vitality above all else.
Around the middle of the 1920s, Dottori achieved the first culmination in his Futurist depictions of the world as seen from the air. Using a splintered, dynamic vocabulary of form he evoked an intoxicating sense of speed. Strong colors, especially red and blue placed against a range of landscape greens, underscored the sense of rapid flight. In 1929, the artist signed the Futurist Aeropainting Manifesto. Dottori’s greatest contribution to Futurist aesthetics was his distinctive interpretation of aeropainting. With their sweeping panoramas and distorted horizons suggesting the curvature of the earth, Dottori’s works exemplify an atmosphere of serenity and lyricism that is unique in Futurist art. In 1941, he wrote his own Umbrian Futurist Aeropainting Manifesto, which called for dense, polycentric, harmonious, and spiritual aerial images.
Dottori remained faithful to Futurism, even after its decline, and continued to exhibit both in Italy and abroad. Even after 1944, where the death of Marinetti and the end of the Second World War had officially marked the end of Futurism, there was no dramatic shift in the style of Dottori. Instead, his work saw a subtle increase in lyricism, launching an artistic season from which a new form of landscape representation emerged, later called ‘new modern landscape’. The works created in this period show soothing views of the Umbrian landscape where Futurist dynamism gives way to the perception of atmospheric infinity.
Dottori died in the Perugia in 1977 and was buried in the Monumental Cemetery of Perugia, in the sector reserved for renowned citizens. His works can be found in the Tate Gallery, UK, the Fondazione Cassa Risparmio Perugia, the Galleria Nazionale of Umbria and the Musei Vaticani, Rome.