Felice Casorati

Felice Casorati was born on 4 December 1883 in Novara, Italy. His family later settled in Padua, where he attended classical high school and, to please his mother, studied law at the University of Padua, earning his degree in July 1906. Through the same years he apprenticed in art under the painter Giovanni Vianello, and in 1907 a painting of his was exhibited at the Venice Biennale, an early sign that painting, not law, would be his career.

In 1913 Casorati took part for the first time in the Ca' Pesaro group exhibitions in Venice, showing works alongside other artists working outside Italy's official academic circles. He settled in Turin, where he built the mature style for which he is best known: quiet, tightly structured compositions of figures and interiors, often described as Magic Realism and linked by critics to Symbolism and the Viennese Secession. He held a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1924, and in 1938 he received the Grand Prize for Painting at the XXI Venice Biennale.

From 1941 Casorati was professor of painting at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, later serving as the academy's director and president, and in 1945 he co-founded the Unione Culturale in Turin. He continued to paint, teach, and exhibit in Turin until his death there on 1 March 1963. A major retrospective of more than one hundred works was mounted at the Palazzo Reale in Milan from 15 February to 29 June 2025, underscoring his continued standing in Italian art history.

Critics and institutions place Casorati among the defining Italian painters of the interwar period, crediting him with a distinctive fusion of figurative clarity and psychological stillness that is usually discussed under the heading of Magic Realism, with acknowledged debts to Symbolism and the Viennese Secession. His inclusion in the anti-academic Ca' Pesaro exhibitions of the 1910s, his Grand Prize at the 1938 Venice Biennale, and his long tenure at the Accademia Albertina in Turin are the recurring landmarks in that assessment, reinforced by the scale of the 2025 Palazzo Reale retrospective in Milan. No verbatim critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed from the available sources, so none is reproduced here.

Casorati's auction market is thin relative to his museum standing and concentrated in Italian and European sale rooms. Market-data services report an all-time auction high of USD 780,597 for Lo studio, sold at Christie's in Milan in 2008, though the exact sale date is not published by that source. Recent public results run well below that figure: Dorotheum in Vienna sold a Casorati work for EUR 69,050 on 23 November 2020, and another for EUR 49,100 with the exact date not published. Collectors should treat the 2008 figure as a reported historical ceiling rather than a typical result, since more recent sales cluster far lower.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Casorati, so provenance and attribution generally rest on the dealers most active with his work, chiefly Mazzoleni and Galleria dello Scudo, alongside museum and exhibition records. Whether either gallery holds any formal estate mandate is not documented in public sources, so collectors should confirm current representation directly before treating either as an official estate authority. Because his auction activity is comparatively sparse and geographically concentrated in Italy, and because the widely cited historical high price lacks a published exact sale date, collectors should treat any single reported price, high or low, with care and seek confirmation from primary auction-house records.