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Alice Psacaropulo
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Daughter of a maritime agent of Greek origin and of a granddaughter of Baron Rosario Currò of Sicily, Alice was born in Trieste into the typical cosmopolitan milieu of the nineteenth-century mercantile bourgeoisie.
Her childhood passed serenely in the family villa — later dedicated to her mother Margherita — built in 1856 from a design attributed to one of the founders of Trieste’s neoclassicism (Giovanni Berlam). The home soon filled with works by the city’s artists active between the 1800s and 1900s: Barison, Iakovidis, Scomparini, Wostry, Zangrando.
Her childhood passed serenely in the family villa — later dedicated to her mother Margherita — built in 1856 from a design attributed to one of the founders of Trieste’s neoclassicism (Giovanni Berlam). The home soon filled with works by the city’s artists active between the 1800s and 1900s: Barison, Iakovidis, Scomparini, Wostry, Zangrando.
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This was her first, most intimate “school of seeing”: the ideal environment in which to nurture a passion for classical art and drawing. Her earliest dated works (1936) are a set of school caricatures — among them one of writer Giani Stuparich, her professor at the Dante Alighieri high school.
Alice signed her works with a childhood nickname that also became a thematic element — “Psa”, a cartoon-style pseudonym and onomatopoetic flourish — an ironic and biting identity with which the young Psacaropulo entered the Triestine scene, only to be soon tested by her resolute decision to continue her training under Felice Casorati.
Alice signed her works with a childhood nickname that also became a thematic element — “Psa”, a cartoon-style pseudonym and onomatopoetic flourish — an ironic and biting identity with which the young Psacaropulo entered the Triestine scene, only to be soon tested by her resolute decision to continue her training under Felice Casorati.
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Between the winter of 1939 and the spring of 1943, Alice indeed lived in Turin.
In the master’s studio she forged friendships with Alfredo Casella, Albino Galvano and Paola Levi-Montalcini, with whom she maintained a brief but intense correspondence. Here she absorbed the rigour of composition and the suspended, silent modes of Casorati’s magic realism. These years influenced not only her later artistic path, but also the critical reception of her relationship with tradition — a relationship which often simply measured how far her art distanced itself from the only certain source: the Casorati model — thereby celebrating in those fertile years of the ’40s her “golden age”.
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Yet if the newly-cut apples on the knife, the pipes strewn across an empty table, the earthy portraits of ordinary men and women “without qualities” were still exercises in ordering that mythology of the everyday so dear to Casorati, then with her return to Trieste and her degree in archaeology the heritage and the independence from the magic-realist model confronted each other on the field of a “synthetic neo-cubism”.
To win entry to the 24th Venice Biennale, the Roman Quadrennials of ’48, ’56 and ’60, and the respect of Gillo Dorfles — who in 1952 curated a major solo show at Galleria Delfino in Rovereto — were now achieved. The bodies had become broken and faceless; landscapes deformed by hostile nature or blistered by cement; above all the still lifes: the “political maps” through which to read the dramatic Triestine situation.
To win entry to the 24th Venice Biennale, the Roman Quadrennials of ’48, ’56 and ’60, and the respect of Gillo Dorfles — who in 1952 curated a major solo show at Galleria Delfino in Rovereto — were now achieved. The bodies had become broken and faceless; landscapes deformed by hostile nature or blistered by cement; above all the still lifes: the “political maps” through which to read the dramatic Triestine situation.
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These were the turbulent years of the Allied Military Government (1945-1954) and the great “ideological” group exhibitions: such as the show-competition dedicated to the city’s patron saint (Saint Justus, 1946) and the one organised by the newly founded Trieste university (1953); at the latter, in particular, Alice took part as the sole woman alongside Leonor Fini.
At the same time, Alice founded the Trieste section of the Soroptimist together with her friends Fulvia Costantinides and Mirella Schott Sbisà; she began teaching; she became a mother.
At the same time, Alice founded the Trieste section of the Soroptimist together with her friends Fulvia Costantinides and Mirella Schott Sbisà; she began teaching; she became a mother.
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The move to Venice in 1960 marked a new turning point.
Alice began to dissolve the vigorous compositional structure of Cubism into colour, and to sink into the abysses of her own interiority.
Her Self-portrait in Blue is, in this sense, a conscious and programmatic work. It was the prelude to the informal trends that animated her marine backgrounds (drawing on Mario De Luigi’s spatialism) and the works of the following decade.
In the same period, commissions for the great “white ships” were intensifying — begun in 1949 with her friend Santomaso and culminating in 1965 with the muralist and Sironian decorations of the ocean liner Raffaello.
Alice began to dissolve the vigorous compositional structure of Cubism into colour, and to sink into the abysses of her own interiority.
Her Self-portrait in Blue is, in this sense, a conscious and programmatic work. It was the prelude to the informal trends that animated her marine backgrounds (drawing on Mario De Luigi’s spatialism) and the works of the following decade.
In the same period, commissions for the great “white ships” were intensifying — begun in 1949 with her friend Santomaso and culminating in 1965 with the muralist and Sironian decorations of the ocean liner Raffaello.
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Back in Trieste in ’71, her interest in abstraction began to fade.
It was time to reinterpret her Venetian experience — including that of the acqua granda, the terrible flood suffered in ’66 and the source of one of the most visionary cycles of her entire output: Venice Submerged.
In the Trieste of the “jeansinari” the experience of the “samberia” — the lively bohème celebrated in the poems of Guido Sambo — was dying out, and the premature death of Miela Reina dealt a heavy blow to the city’s openness to the contemporary.
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Alice soon felt the need to escape and set out again: first to the Pusterian valleys, where she found the house that would become her “buen retiro”. Then in 1978, the year in which the Basaglia Law was passed, she journeyed to Central America. It was the trip that sealed her definitive return to the figurative — albeit in evanescent forms of a surreal reality that blends sacred and profane, in what Sgarbi called “provisional realism”.
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And it is the sacred that became the new field of interest in her work of the 1980s, opened by what Decio Gioseffi foresaw as “its apotheosis”: the grand commission for the Assumption in the church of Cessalto (TV), for which Alice confronted the Venetian Renaissance tradition. The call of the beyond certainly springs from the sorrowful events of the era: the premature loss of a nephew and above all that of her beloved husband.
A “spiritual orchestra” began to populate her canvases of the 1990s, where musicians teach the woods to make the names of loved ones resound.
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The early 2000s were years of retrospection, of cataloguing and in some cases of revisiting certain themes of her oeuvre.
Music is, in this sense, the “karstic” motif par excellence and — as Marina Poggi d’Angelo already noted — the ideal theme by which to embrace new symbolist drives. But nostalgia still had one final creative surge, with the Cycladic Idols — the deities of her ancestral lands — which Alice painted until her last days, inserting them ironic and drowsy into a vanishing landscape, now more spiritual than real: a landscape of the soul.
Music is, in this sense, the “karstic” motif par excellence and — as Marina Poggi d’Angelo already noted — the ideal theme by which to embrace new symbolist drives. But nostalgia still had one final creative surge, with the Cycladic Idols — the deities of her ancestral lands — which Alice painted until her last days, inserting them ironic and drowsy into a vanishing landscape, now more spiritual than real: a landscape of the soul.
