Giovanni Acci (1910-1979). The artist and the works of art

From 18 December to 6 February, 2011, one hundred years after the birth of the Florentine painter Giovanni Acci, Piestrsanta Town Council’s Office for the Arts pays homage to this artist, who lived for some time in Versilia, with an extensive retrospective of his work. The exhibition, including previously unseen works, is on show at the church and cloister of Sant’Agostino, and curated by his daughter, Maria Acci Kazantjis.

The exhibition includes more than seventy paintings of various genres: self-portraits, still lives, landscapes and figures with mythological or religious backgrounds. These large works cover the course of the artist’s career; most are family owned, and a number originate from private and public collections, churches, museums and credit institutions.

Short biography
Born in Florence 14 July, 1910, he was introduced to painting through various artistic experiences. He studied the violin privately, and graduated in 1935 from the Philharmonic Academy in Bologna.
He began teaching himself to draw at twenty-eight and held his first one-man exhibition in 1942 in Lyceum in his birth town, where he had success with both the public and critics.
The outbreak of the war interrupted his early contacts with the Florentine art world and forced him to flee with his father to a small town in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, where he was to meet his future wife, Milena.
Returning to Florence, after already having endured much hardship and misfortune, he found his house destroyed and had to adjust to living in a refugee camp.
From 1947 to ’49 he formed part of the “Pittori Moderni della Realtà” (Modern Realist Artists), taking part in all the exhibitions organised by this group, which included Pietro Annigoni, Antonio and Xavier Bueno, Carlo Guarienti, Gregorio Sciltian and Alfredo Serri – all Milan and Florence based artists of the period who identified with absolute accuracy in representation. In this period he was introduced to art lovers and collectors, including Sandro Rubboli who offered him the chance to move to Versilia, to Marina di Pietrasanta, where lived, with his family, from 1955.
His works feature in important public and private collections in Italy and abroad. He died in Pietrasanta in 1979.