Biography

CREMA Giovani Battista, painter (Ferrara 1883 – Rome 1964). After the first classical studies he attended the lessons of the Ferrarese painter A. Longanesi, then he moved to the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples where he had as teachers the old Domenico Morelli, then Michele Cammarano.

In 1903 he settled permanently in Rome where the initial preference for social subjects, typical of the Neapolitan way, was diluted in a symbolism with a divisionist approach close to the results of Gaetano Previati with a technique borrowed from the first Giacomo Balla. As Stefano Grandesso rightly states, “Two constants characterize Giovanni Battista Crema’s painting formally: on the one hand, naturalism in the organic coherence of the representation and in the plastic definition of the volumes; on the other the divisionist technique that the Ferrara artist did not use with the rigor of a scientific investigation tool of the vision, but which for him was rather a sort of skin of painting with which to expand the evocative and sentimental content of the representation – in line with the example of the countryman Gaetano Previati – or enriching the chromatic values ​​of the painting “.

In 1907 he had a personal Rome at the Association of Amateurs and Cultists. Also in Rome he also participates in the great International Exhibition of 1911 and in the three Biennials (1921,23 and 25).

Finally, his extraordinary war reportages, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1942, when embarked on the warships of the Italian Royal Navy, managed with sobriety without rhetorical accents to return the chronicle of the lives of the sailors, such as the excited drama of war actions.

He dies peacefully in his Rome, which is experiencing the unrepeatable years of the economic boom.