Antonietta Raphaël Mafai Lithuan/ Italian, 1895-1975

Antonietta Raphaël (1895–1975) was a Lithuanian painter and sculptor naturalised Italian, whose vigorously anti-academic conception presides over her activity in the field of sculpture, which – especially after the Second World War – was the main focus of her oeuvre.
 
She moved to Rome in 1924, where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts and met the painter Mario Mafai, with whom immediately developed a passionate but troubled relationship, both in life and art. After the birth of their first daughter, the couple decided to settle down in Rome and their house, located in Via Cavour, became a hub for Roman artistic life, laying the basis that will lead to the creation of the artistic group "Via Cavour" - that later became the "Roman School". 
 
After an artistic and bohemian intellectual experience in Paris, where Raphaël began to develop her vocation for sculpture, she returned to Rome and started working in the studio of the sculptor Ettore Colla. Femininity and motherhood are key concepts recurring in her sculptural production. Several times in her writings, she links women to God for the ability to “create something from nothing,” which returns in a more strictly autobiographical key in her work. 
 
Few years after her painting debut, Antonietta exhibited as a sculptor in 1936 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on occasion of the "VI Mostra del Sindacato Fascista di Belle Arti del Lazio", where she exhibited again in 1938 despite the political and artistic situation in Rome was starting to be marked by the fascist regime and anti-Semitism. Antonietta, as an immigrant and a Jew, was banned from all exhibitions and risked being deported. 
 
The post-war period brought Raphaël great recognition as an artist. In 1948 she was invited to the Quadriennale d'Arte in Rome and the same year she took part in the Venice Biennale with the sculptural group Le tre sorelle [The Three Sisters]. In 1952 she held an important solo exhibition at the Galleria dello Zodiaco in Rome. The 1960 was a crucial year for Raphael’s career: both an anthological exhibition at the Centro Culturale Olivetti in Ivrea and a monograph by Valentino Martinelli were dedicated to her. 
 
On 31 March 1965 Mario Mafai, from whom she had legally separated five years earlier, died. Her profound turmoil found relief, in terms of her art, in an ever-greater commitment to painting and an intensification of her works on Jewish-religious subjects. She died in 1975 in Rome. The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome dedicated to the artist the great retrospective Antonietta Raphaël. Attraverso lo specchio in 2021.