1918 decreed the end of the most atrocious war humanity had ever known until then. With it there ended not only a dramatic three years of death, but also that avant-garde fervour that had swept across Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and that now no one wished to follow any longer: no more movements of rupture, no avant-gardes to unhinge the rules of society. The end of the war meant looking back, gathering up the rubble and rebuilding the present by trusting in the certainties of tradition, recovering the sense of history, of humanity, and the vestiges of a civilisation destined for greatness. There emerged that rappel à l’ordre that drove artists of various backgrounds to return to the languages of the past: Picasso in France and Carrà in Italy set out on the road of a return to painting according to the fundamentals of the “craft”, as Giorgio de Chirico had for some time been preaching. And it was in the latter’s Metaphysics that certain artists developed languages capable of combining tradition with a feeling of renewed expectancy, in which society, still disoriented by the war, appeared numbed by a sense of suspension and introspective inquiry, pushing art ever further towards the sphere of the dreamlike.
Along these lines emerged Magic Realism, a tendency that harked back to the traditional formulas of painting (portrait, landscape, still life), enriched by an inner vein of narrative suspension that nonetheless belonged to an innovative channel peculiar to the historical period under way. Not a true movement, but rather a language able to spread rapidly across Europe, drawing in artists and critics with its charge of stasis and slowness, as if seeking to halt the advance of progress by heightening the dreamlike and transcendent dimension. The term was brought into currency by the writer Massimo Bontempelli in 1927, who used it in issue IV of the review “900” and borrowed it from Franz Roh, who two years earlier had published the volume Nach-Expressionismus magischer Realismus; Probleme der neusten europäischen Malerei, in which he also included Donghi. Realists because devoted to the figurative, magical because their painting expressed something estranging, hovering vaguely between reality and imagination: “Magic is not only sorcery”, wrote Bontempelli himself, “any enchantment is magic… perhaps art is the only spell granted to man […] it is the evocation of dead things, the apparition of distant things, the prophecy of future things, the overturning of the laws of nature, wrought by the imagination alone”.

Smooth, statuesque, marble-like bodies with diaphanous skin, austere and anchored to an essentiality that quashed any suspected collusion with the pre-war avant-gardes, bearing in mind the words of Carrà: “Art is a supremely voluptuous dream; a dream of desperate sweetness; but it is also a corporeal dream so dense with reality as to hold grave dangers”. Hence the references to the past, in particular Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, learned citations through which tradition re-emerged to reawaken a society in the grip of the nightmares of madness: Felice Casorati, Cagnaccio di San Pietro, Achille Funi, Carlo Levi, Ubaldo Oppi, Edita Broglio, Pietro Marrusig are some of the best-known names that in Italy made up the ranks of these realists with a magical bent.
It is along these lines that the language of Antonio Donghi (Rome 1897-1963) matured, the artist “who fled the wind”, as he was described for his inability to paint when the weather did not allow absolute stillness. Movement was synonymous with the avant-garde, and with Futurism in particular, still active and once again on the rise. And so Donghi sought the absolute opposite: to stop time and make it eternal, as art had done for millennia.
Thus were born his most emblematic figures, such as Il giocoliere, of 1936, improbable and precarious, real and imaginary, elegant, impeccable, with his grey bodice and his hat held before his mouth, poised for a few seconds and petrified forever by the power of painting. A language that passed unaltered through the two decades between the wars: the Ammaestratrice di cani, for example, of 1946, a pleasant subject, treated with the finest irony despite her attitude, fixed in her gaze towards the viewer, out where the world of the living extends, and the little dogs, rendered in miniature as though they were ceramic ornaments, which betray, once again, Donghi’s inclination to separate painting irremediably from real life. Or again in the work Donna al caffè, where the figure stands proud and expectant, not disfigured by smoke and alcohol, as in the late-Romantic epic of decadent Paris, but elegant and simple, without showing the slightest irreverent attitude. Similarly Le villeggianti (1934), a reassuring setting in which two young women pause delicately at the edge of a low wall beside an evocative valley. In the distance, the vestiges of ancient architecture bring the scene back into the dialogue between present and past, while the figures make no secret of their bourgeois background: the white shoes matched to the pure-white stockings, the pastel-coloured dresses perfectly adapted to the posture of the body, and the parasol, held aloft, protecting the rosy complexion of the face from the intense summer sun.

An exquisitely Roman artist, his destiny would have been to portray the Capital like his colleagues Mafai, Scipione and Raphaël, had it not been for his encounter with De Chirico, from whose Metaphysics he was able to grasp that enveloping dimension of estranging, timeless seduction. Supported and assisted by friends and collectors such as the musician Alfredo Casella and the critic Ugo Ojetti, Donghi reflected in his painting not only his own time but also his own character: shy and reserved, a stranger to the excesses of the bohémien. A distance from worldly life made up for through the ironic and vaguely eccentric expression of his painting; modest and melancholy, Roman, it was said, of a petty-bourgeois Romanness. The son of a cloth merchant, he lived his whole life in the Trevi district, thrifty and solitary, little accustomed to women and reluctant to travel, his only stay abroad in 1928, in Paris, a city towards which he remained little more than indifferent. Not modernity, but Rome, the age-old city, was his horizon, where painting could settle into the routine of daily life. His landscapes too expressed that nostalgic attention to the past: the views, among them Sant’Anastasia al Palatino and San Bonaventura, for example, in which the subtle play of alternation between residential structures and the soft surrounding vegetation lends the whole an unaltered architectural plasticity. As do the still lifes, cold and alluring, of an absolute smoothness and wholly incapable of expressing life.
Close to the Novecento italiano, in 1929 he took part in the movement’s second exhibition, in Milan, and in 1930 in the Mostra del Novecento italiano organised by Margherita Sarfatti in Buenos Aires, but he was never a true exponent of it, just as he was not of Metaphysics. Donghi was Donghi, distant from movements too, but not from artistic commitment, which was in any case acknowledged. He took part four times in the Venice Biennale, from 1926 to 1932, and then in the exhibition Italienische Maler in Zurich in 1927. At the first Rome Quadriennale (1931) he was present with three works, in the same room where the protagonists of the Scuola Romana were exhibiting, while in 1935, at the second Quadriennale, he had a small solo show, which he presented with a catalogue containing a text of his own. The following year, finally, he obtained the post of Figure Drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts and Art Lyceum of Rome, dividing himself from that point on between teaching and painting, developing landscape themes above all.

From the years after the Second World War, gradually, his painting becomes ever more analytical, verging on the calligraphic, the vegetation treated with the tip of the brush, as in the series of works devoted to the Autostrada del Sole, around 1961. But here too there is no movement: the artist confronts modernity by denying it its most obvious character, speed. In Donghi’s paintings the road becomes a simple grey strip in the background, deserted, abstract and surreal. And this once again reflects his solitary character, ever more pronounced as the years advanced, isolated, a stranger to artistic debate, weakened in his eyesight and obsessed with taxes, afflicted by nervous disorders and relegated, by the few critics who still remembered him, to a faded exponent of a tendency by then superseded.
Donghi died in Rome on 16 July 1963, carrying with him the burden of a painting that had matured in difficult years but from which he never managed to distance himself. His work still today, a century on from that year 1918, remains confined to the two decades between the wars, cold as the need to react against the fire of the avant-garde and alluring as the fables that live outside time.

Andrea Baffoni is an art historian and critic. Editor of the journal Contemporart (Modena), he earned a doctorate in the History of Contemporary Art at the University of Perugia. A member of the Archivio Gerardo Dottori, an essayist and curator, in 2015 he published the volume Contro ogni reazione. Enrico Prampolini teorico e promotore artistico, Lantana, Rome.