Brunetta

Mateldi Brunetta (1904-1988) was an italian sketcher, illustrator and painter. “I knew Brunetta also before the war, I mean, I would meet her here and there, small, thin, and turning left-and-right on high heels, with very green eyes heavily made-up (she reminded me of Colette), hidden by very beautiful and eccentric hats that she often manufactured on her own. But my very first meeting with Brunetta occurred during the first year of the war, in Bagutta, the Milanese trattoria where, in 1927, the ancestor of the Italian literature awards was born. I had been admitted to the famous table shortly before. That evening I wore a cognac-colored velvet tricorn hat with a chenille dotted veil. Seated in front of me, Brunetta asked me to raise the veil and within ten minutes she did a delicious sketch of me without any caricature. “My third eye didn’t really capture anything which could give rise to a malicious caricature.” She didn’t need a third eye, she had radar. She amazed me when I saw her at the presentations, in the theater, or in the street. Her sketches were extremely precise and yet more real than reality. Her drawings of designs by Balenciaga had a more Spanish air than the original drawings done by Cristobal himself. One day, I told her so. She answered: “My eyes are like certain lenses, with the focal point which captures the most unusual, aggressive or hidden detail.” For this reason, she was able to transform the most common people into personalities: she undressed them and dressed them again through her pencil, as they wanted and had to be in order to represent that type, that dress, that environment. Perhaps she applied that implacable lens also to herself, because once, looking at herself in a mirror, she told me: “I can’t see myself, you know? I don’t exist, I’m one of my characters.” Humor or bitterness for not loving herself as she was and as she didn’t want to be seen? For sure, her sudden changes of mood often left those who didn’t know her well confused. Her outbursts of laughter followed by long silences, her almost furtive kindnesses followed by impoliteness or violent protests, were just the consequences of an extreme sensitivity and intelligence, and of a terrible loneliness. Born in Ivrea, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin and in Bologna. She arrived in Milan as the very young bride of Filiberto Mateldi, a set designer, painter, and caricaturist. Her husband was a great friend of Lucio Ridenti, who, like him, was from the Piedmont. Ridenti was the last European dandy, and the founder and longtime director of an important theater magazine of the time, Il Dramma. The two men gave her an education. “I owe everything to my husband,” she would often say, forgetting all that she had given him during the long years of his illness, sacrificing to him also the big chance she had been offered to go to New York for a very important international event. But Brunetta was known by the foreigners who really mattered. The acute, lively, Irishwoman Carmel Snow, the director of Harper’s Bazaar, was the first to open the pages of her beautiful magazine to her. During the presentations in Paris, she wanted Brunetta to make sketches for her, “because there isn’t a more inspired interpreter than Brunetta.” Pierre Cardin had such high esteem of her that he organized an exhibition of her work at his Espace: “She isn’t simply an interpreter of fashion, she can recreate it with genius.” He was right because her sketches mirrored the inexorable back and forth of time, the changes and the thefts of these years. She left precious booklets and notes for sketches that are more revealing that the diaries of Goncourt: they are a visual witness that ranges from the society of the Hotel de Paris in Montecarlo to the anonymous people in the Jardin de Luxembourg, from De Chirico to Joséphine Baker, and from Twiggy to the Italian mothers in the time of Mussolini. Orio Vergani wrote: “Drawing and painting are instinctive in her. To draw she would use ash or blush. She would draw using the powder on butterfly wings. But instinct isn’t much if it is not guided by a feeling, which isn’t that so-called sensitivity, or the beat of a heart. This feeling is our ability to measure life, not in the way drawing mathematically measures an eye, a hand, an arm, but life, the power of that eye, hand, and arm. This is how Brunetta’s sketches and watercolors were born. They aren’t “women’s sketches” or plain references to fashion, but stories of women, tales of an hour of femininity, with the whole mystery of its coquetries and melancholies.”