La casa del poeta (I) [The Poet’s House (I)]

During his early years, Emilio Pettoruti went to Italy to study the art of the great masters of the Renaissance. Instead, he became fascinated by the avant-garde movements of Futurism and Cubism that he encountered in the 1910s. In works such as La casa del poeta, the first in a series of four works by the same title, he arrived at a synthesis of both styles. He favored Futurism’s dynamic angles and geometric representation of light and combined them with Cubism’s reduction of figures to flat, simplified shapes. The result is somewhat paradoxical, blending realistic architectural details with a sense of space that is fluid and unstable.