Unknown, I Am Innocent!, Original Drawing on Paper, 1970s

Sono Innocente! (I am innocent!) is an original drawing on paper, realized around the Seventies by the great Italian artist and journalist, Mino Maccari (Siena, 1898 - 1989). Black felt-tip pen drawing on ivory-colored and watermarked paper “Chinese paper”. Hand-Signed "Maccari" in pencil on the lower-right margin. Excellent condition: as good as new. With the incredible satiric and caustic touch of the illustrator of Il Selvaggio, this contemporary artwork depicts a the funny scene in which a man in jail in an attempt to widen the bars of his prison screams affirming his innocence. The typical sentence of criminals or thievesis : “I am Innocent!”. A prison guard looks over him while he is accompanying to the door a burly lawyer, defender, who is smoking a cigar. This original Maccari’s drawing, like a cinema scene, describes a real situation with a superb fluidity of the sign. This unique piece surely could enrich your private collection with a Italian satiric touch and elegance! Mino Maccari (Siena, 1898 – Rome, 1989) Mino Maccari was a popular Italian painter and engraver with a caustic personality, called in 1924 by Angiolo Bencini to collaborate as illustrator for the magazine Il Selvaggio, an admittedly intransigent fascist, revolutionary and anti-bourgeois magazine. Here Maccari published his first engravings. and after he took over the direction of the Savage which he held until 1942. In 1959, he became the director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome; in 1963, he won Antonio Feltrinelli's prize for painting and became president of the San Luca Academy in 1962. In the same year of one of the biggest Italian academic honour, Maccari managed to obtain a personal exhibition at Gallery 63 in New York. His production of drawings, watercolors, tempera, lithographs is exhausted, sometimes in collaboration with prestigious publishing houses (Strapaese, Il selvaggio), of satirical, political or erotic subject matters.