Lazarus Walter

Walter Lazzaro (Rome, 5 December 1914 – Milan, 3 March 1989) was an Italian painter and actor. His training, as well as in his father's workshop, took place in Rome at the Art School and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Subsequently, from 1935, he became a teacher of Painting in the Art High School of Rome and in the Fine Arts academies of Rome, Carrara, Bologna, Milan-Brera. The iconographic peculiarity that distinguishes his art of the first period is the presence of deserted beaches with solitary boats, umbrellas and deckchairs, blue and white striped cabins, or hinted motionless figures, immersed in a diaphanous light, spaces where, as Giorgio De Chirico, you feel the subtle presence of this life that is silent, of this silent life; who is silent, but who with his silence says many things that cannot commonly be heard. They are immobile landscapes waiting for something in which, as Giuseppe Manzoni di Chiosca said, the viewer does not feel attacked or rejected, as happens with much of contemporary art, but rather involved in that elegiac atmosphere and almost invited to enter. himself in the painting (to fill the lack of other human presences) to take part in a silent dialogue with things or, further down, with the infinite, with God. His painting, within the context of the Roman School, is poetics of the "Silences", "the metaphysical painter of silence is a definition by Lionello Venturi from 1954. The war will largely mark his life and a caesura in his art, taken prisoner while he was on duty as a lieutenant of the grenadiers and deported to a concentration camp in Poland, he will describe this experience in numerous drawings and paintings, the twisted and suffering figures are from this period. In numerous paintings that represent the suffering experienced in the concentration camps (one of these was used by the Italian post office to commemorate the day of remembrance), writings and words such as "hunger...hunger" can be found. At the end of the conflict, Lazzaro, having returned to Italy, resumes teaching and starts painting his pictures again, but from that moment on the human figure is absent in his landscapes, the presence of man is felt only in the artefacts and portraits where “Great importance is attributed to the eyes as a mirror of interiority. In 1958 he founded the Poets-Painters Movement. We also remember him as an actor in various films, among other things he was the protagonist in La fornarina (film) by Enrico Guazzoni in 1943 where he played Raffaello Sanzio. He made his debut at just 18 years old with a solo exhibition at Palazzo Torlonia curated by Federico Hermanin, then director of Palazzo Venezia, and subsequently participated in numerous exhibitions, among which it is worth mentioning his 5 participations in the Quadrennial of Rome. In 2013, on the occasion of Remembrance Day, Poste Italiane placed a special postmark created with a design by Walter Lazzaro. One of his self-portraits is present in the collection of Palazzo Pitti in Florence, a painting "invitation to solitude" is preserved in the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.