(from http://www.gerardodottori.net/) The first of four children, Gerardo was born on 11 November 1884 in Perugia into a family of modest means; his mother died before long, leaving the children at a tender age and in a precarious economic situation. Having finished primary school, and with his artistic talent soon emerging, he began to attend the evening preparatory courses of the “Pietro Vannucci” Academy of Fine Arts in his city, while in the mornings he worked as a shop assistant for the antiquarian and restorer Mariano Rocchi. He then followed the courses to become a decorative painter; between 1904 and 1907 he produced his first convincing works with Divisionist accents, such as Fanciulla umbra (1904), in search of a language that would free him from academic teachings he considered stale. Having graduated from the Academy in 1906, he intensified his activity as an interior decorator, which he had long since taken up and by which he supported himself. Seeking greater opportunities for earning, he moved to Milan, where for some months he carried out murals in private buildings in the Milanese hinterland. That stay became an opportunity to deepen his knowledge of Divisionist painting and would prove fundamental to the evolution of his pictorial language. Aware of the cultural backwardness of the provinces and of its limits, he continued to decorate interiors without neglecting painting and, attentive to the new cultural ferment, in 1908 he came into contact with the intellectuals who in Florence directed the avant-garde critical review “La Difesa dell’Arte”. At the same time he placed himself at the head of a group of artists, musicians and writers who challenged the old teachings of the Academy of Fine Arts.
He discovered en plein air painting during his excursions on the mountains surrounding his city, along with a love for visions of a wider landscape. The year 1909 marked the beginning of his mural decorations in religious buildings in Umbria, as in the church of Santa Maria Assunta at Monte Vibiano Vecchio near Todi.
In this climate a work fundamental to the later Futurist developments came into being, Esplosione di rosso sul verde, (London, Tate Modern) dated 1910, in reality some three years later, a painting of rupture and reaction against tradition. As he recalls, “… It was 1909, Futurism had been founded by Marinetti … but its echo had not yet reached the provinces”. His polemical and acute vein also found expression in writing placed at the service of the review “La Difesa dell’Arte”, which would host a short story of his and art criticism attacking the cultural situation in Perugia and those who managed it, setting off a controversy in the local press. He continued landscape painting and sent two paintings to the Prima Esposizione Nazionale Giovanile di Belle Arti in Naples at the end of 1911, which were accepted. On the return journey he met Giacomo Balla in Rome, an artist who profoundly marked his artistic path and directed him towards new expressive forms. His adherence to Futurism dates to 1912, and the activity of the Perugian Futurist group intensified, gathering in the café in the centre known as “Mezzabestia” (as the young avant-gardists nicknamed the owner) to discuss the renewal of art proposed by the echoes reaching them of Marinetti’s manifesto. From this period date the first studies of motociclisti, ciclisti, ritmi astrali, esplosioni that exalt a dynamic and synthetic vision of movement. In April 1914 he was one of the main organizers of the memorable Futurist Evening held at the Politeama Turreno in Perugia in the presence of Marinetti and other leading figures of the Movement, an event that had a wide and contested echo in the local press.
In 1915 he left for the First World War, but he would continue to paint with makeshift means and above all to write novellas, short stories, notes and many “parole in libertà”, some of them signed with the pseudonym G. Voglio and published in the periodical “L’Italia Futurista”. Still at the front, news reached him from Perugia of his appointment as an Academician of merit of the Academy of Fine Arts, but through a printed article he declared the incompatibility between his being a painter of the Italian artistic avant-garde and the office in an institution at odds with his ideas. Back from the war, he soon resumed contact with his Futurist friends; in 1919 he returned to exhibiting and organized, with the writer Presenzini Mattoli and others of the Umbrian avant-garde group, a Futurist Evening in Perugia and a Conference on Futurism in Assisi, declaiming poems and exhibiting his works. The following year, with Presenzini Mattoli, he founded the periodical “Griffa!” (from the expression of the ancient war cry of the Perugians) for the “rebirth of Umbrian artistic life”, which won flattering approval and which, though short-lived, managed to organize the Prima Esposizione d’Arte Moderna in Perugia, stirring the calm waters of the city’s artistic and cultural milieu. His relations with Marinetti grew closer; Marinetti would visit the artist’s studio and would inaugurate his first solo exhibition in Rome. In this period Dottori drew closer to stage design (with Ricciardi at the Teatro Argentina in Rome and then at the Teatro Turreno in Perugia) and to the study of a more dilated and distorted vision of the landscape, such as Il Lago, the first example of a “static” aeropictorial vision, yet exasperatedly dilated to a fish-eye.
He created important decorations for the Tea Room of the Bar Ricci in Perugia in 1923, (destroyed in the 1960s), but also advertising graphics for posters and packaging wrappers. In October, in the presence of Marinetti and his wife Benedetta, the Restaurant Altro Mondo was inaugurated in the Umbrian capital, fitted out by the artist with a genuine Futurist setting (unfortunately destroyed), where Dottori also took care of the furnishings, such as the wrought-iron elements and the furniture. In the same year he produced the cover for La Danza di Frine by A. C. Galeazzi for the publisher F. Campitelli, testifying to a constant interest in graphics that would continue throughout his career. In 1924, despite the epistolary disapproval of Marinetti, who had not managed to have the Futurists officially included in the Venice Biennale, one of his paintings, Primavera umbra, was accepted by the selection committee. In the same year, in Milan, he took part as a speaker in the “First Futurist Congress”, speaking on the “aesthetics of the machine and rural futurisms” and defining his particular pictorial poetics, which set him apart from the mechanicism of the other Futurists. In 1926 he began work as a decorator in Rome, and the intended stay of a few months would extend until 1939, when he would return to Perugia to teach. In the capital he supported himself by writing art columns for newspapers and periodicals and through his artistic activity, contributing to the elaboration of the Futurist “political” line, also through his polemics against traditional figurative painting. The most important work of this period is the Trittico della velocità, praised more than once by Marinetti, which, together with the mural decoration of the Ostia Seaplane Base of 1928, would mark the affirmation of aeropainting, giving new impetus to the Futurist course. These works would be important stages towards the elaboration of the Manifesto dell’Aeropittura. In these same years he experimented with ceramic art, collaborating with Giuseppe Fabbri of Faenza. From the 1930s he also devoted himself to making Futurist furniture, among which is remembered the dining room for the Roman home of Guido Cimino, and he took an interest in fashion, designing uniforms, evening dress and sportswear. In the Manifesto dell’Arte Sacra Futurista signed by Marinetti and Fillia in 1931 he is remembered as the first Futurist painter to renew sacred art. With Anno X the Umbrian artist won, at the 1932 Venice Biennale, the Prize of the Ministry of Corporations, and together with Enrico Prampolini he was the only Futurist to collaborate on the exhibition for the tenth anniversary of the Fascist Revolution held in Rome. The following year he took part in the project for Prampolini’s Stazione per aeroporto civile exhibited at the Milan Triennale, and with the Trittico del Golfo he won the Golfo della Spezia National Painting Prize, and he made designs for stained-glass windows in collaboration with a glassworks in Rome. He returned definitively to his native city in 1939, and between 1936 and 1938 he taught at the Art Institute of Perugia, before being entrusted with the chair of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, becoming its director in 1940. At the end of 1941 he wrote the Manifesto umbro dell’aeropittura, his statement of poetics in which he specifies the originality of his own aeropictorial language, published in the first monograph on the artist, prefaced by Marinetti for the Edizioni futuriste di poesia.
In 1945 he would leave the directorship of the Academy, while continuing to teach Painting until 1966. From the late 1940s his activity of sacred and profane decorations, which he carried out in the area of Lake Trasimeno, intensified. As a consequence of the condition of local and national isolation, common to the survivors of Futurism, Dottori was relegated to a limbo from which he did nothing to emerge quickly; he continued, however, to paint and to exhibit. The rediscovery of Futurism and its protagonists reached him late. His first postwar solo exhibition was in 1951 in Milan, the year in which he was invited to the first historical exhibition on the avant-garde movement, held in Bologna. He exhibited incessantly in very many group shows, above all in Umbria, where he was always considered an undisputed master, continuing to take part in and win numerous prizes. In 1957 he donated five of his masterpieces to the Municipality of Perugia to form the nucleus of the future Gallery of Modern Art, and the city organized a first retrospective of his work. In 1960 the artist met Tancredi Loreti, an entrepreneur and art collector, who would devote himself to promoting the figure and work of Dottori. To him are owed dozens of exhibitions and initiatives in Italy and abroad, the monograph with text by Guido Ballo of 1970, and the relations with the young critics who were rediscovering Futurism. Following a request, he donated the painting Esplosione di rosso sul verde to the Tate Gallery in London in 1972, and two years later a great retrospective was held in Trieste for his ninetieth birthday. He painted until the last day of a long life, and in his final period he would also produce a series of “abstract” works, with techniques unusual for him, such as felt-tip pens. Even in these last works one perceives the artist’s continual need to combine dynamism, synthesis and simultaneity, and therefore modernity, as Futurism had taught, with the essence of nature and of man, in order to arrive at the spiritualization of nature itself.
Dottori died on 13 June 1977 in his home on viale Pellini in Perugia.