Carlo Frua De Angeli

Carlo Frua De Angeli was a renowned Italian collector of modern art, as well as a patron of art and architecture. His collection included significant works by the European avant-garde, including Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, and by Italian artists active during the interwar period, such as Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, and Giorgio Morandi. He also played a central role in the promotion of Italian modern art abroad—lending key works to major exhibitions—and contributed financial support to galleries and editorial activities internationally.

Frua De Angeli grew up in a wealthy family of industrialists that collected broadly, including ancient and nineteenth-century art. In 1902 he began to work in the textile business started by his father Giuseppe Frua and his maternal uncle, Ernesto De Angeli, becoming chairman of the family enterprise in the early 1930s.

By 1920, Frua De Angeli was in contact with a dense network of galleries and dealers, among them the Galleria del Milione and the Galleria Barbaroux in Milan, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paul Rosenberg, and Ernst Beyeler in Paris and Basel. These relationships were mutually beneficial: the collector purchased new works for his collection but also consigned through the same dealers. Paintings by Picasso formed the core of his collection. He owned dozens of examples, including Three Women at the Spring (1921) and Night Fishing at Antibes (1939), both now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Nude Woman (1910; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.). The collector also played a crucial role in realizing many of Picasso’s exhibitions between the late 1940s and early 1960s; without loans from his holdings, for instance, the first two solo shows of the artist in Italy (in 1948, at the Venice Biennale, and in 1949, at the Galleria Il Milione) would not have been possible.

As part of a larger international strategy aimed at strengthening the cultural and diplomatic relations between Italy and France, Frua De Angeli donated a significant group of Italian paintings to the Musée Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 1932, including works by Carrà, De Chirico, and Gino Severini, among others. This led to the opening of a room at the Jeu de Paume devoted to the works.

Two years later, Frua De Angeli married the American sculptor Mary Callery, with whom he built a collection of modern art. They divorced in 1937 but seem to have maintained their collection together until at least 1950. Some of these works were kept in New York City, including Amedeo Modigliani’s painting Buste de Femme (ca. 1919; unknown location), which Frua De Angeli had purchased from Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in the 1920s.

In 1938 Frua De Angeli established a business relationship with publisher and critic Christian Zervos and his wife, Yvonne. The collector became a frequent financial contributor to Zervos’s magazine Cahiers d’art and to some volumes of Picasso’s catalogue raisonné, which Zervos edited. For their part, the Zervos couple acted as intermediary in the purchase of several Picasso paintings on behalf of Frua De Angeli and Callery and sometimes stored the works in France.

During the early 1950s, with the Amici di Brera, a private group that supports the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Frua De Angeli promoted several exhibitions of Italian modern art in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, and Paris. On these occasions he lent many key paintings, mainly by De Chirico, Carrà, Modigliani, and Morandi, artists who played a central role in his collection.

In parallel, Frua De Angeli expanded his own collecting interests. His friendship with French critic Michel Tapié, the theorist of Art Informel, inspired him to acquire such paintings and to open a small gallery in his Parisian apartment at the end of the 1940s for the public to view these works. Frua De Angeli’s collection numbered more than fifty works by Jean Dubuffet (including Tête de Femme, 1951, now at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Le géomancien, 1952, private collection; and Paysage métapsychique, 1952, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa), purchased mostly from Tapié and Galerie René Drouin, as well as key paintings by Jean Fautrier, Georges Mathieu, and Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), and those by American artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey.

At the time of Frua De Angeli’s death, part of his collection had already been gradually sold and part was inherited by his three children and later dispersed.