Emilio Giuseppe Dossena: a Life in the Arts.

Emilio Giuseppe Dossena is born December 10, 1903 in the small town of Cavenago D’Adda, then in the province of Milan (now in the province of Lodi), in Northern Italy. Life, already hard, becomes even more difficult for him with the loss of the father, as he is just twelve years old at the time. Camillo, the fourteen years old brother, and the young Emilio Giuseppe are forced to support the family hereafter. Only when the three brothers and two sisters are married, feeling released from all responsibilities as head of household, the artist weds the twenty years old Cornelia Ginevra Zacchetti, also a Lombard. In the same year of his marriage, in 1937, he loses his mother, an invalid for many years due to an accidental fall.

The artistic experience of the Brera Academy and Scuola del Castello, attended at the times by Guttuso, Cantatore, Lilloni and Sassu, allows him to live a dignified life despite the difficult times and his stance against fascism.
During this period, he begins to work as a restorer of paintings and decorator in the classical style, a profession which he will keep throughout his life. In the later years of the prewar period, he is often in open conflict with both fascists and communists, but luckily never finds himself in irreversible situations. At all times he supports ,openly and without hesitation, Catholicism and the love for his country. Meanwhile, he devotes every free minute to his easel production, creating fascinating works in Neo-Impressionist style, with a palette based on earths that gives his paintings a unique image and originality. The first solo exhibition at the Milanese Galleria Gavioli in 1943, has a resounding success: while the country is at war, all the exhibited works are sold!

His color palette preserves, throughout the forties, the original tonalities that reflect both the environment, without strong contrasting colors, and the need to create his paintings using natural pigments. The industrial revolution and the postwar economic boom affect his stroke, which becomes more vigorous and perhaps even more essential to the replication of the impression, even though he does preserve an attachment to realism that will complement the artist in almost all his career. The works will show an enhancement of the greens and blues, using a charged, increasingly exuberant color palette, for which he is renowned.

The favorite subject is his children, given his immense love for them, but the landscape enters ever more into his repertoire, receiving strong critical acclaim.
Balancing his artistic fervor with the activities necessary to meet the needs of a large family, he always manages to give a respectable life to his six children, while continuing his production, without any compromise, based on economic considerations.

During this time he restores and decorates the castles of Parrano and Monte Giove, in Umbria, and many villas of aristocrats and captains of industry in Lombardy. In 1968, an accidental explosion in a store above his studio in Milan, destroys it. Almost sixty-five years old, he decides to emigrate to the USA, where family friends promised him a revitalization of his career, which at this point has reached a plateau and does not seem to find the necessary stimuli for a renewal.
The impact with America is primarily responsible for the dramatic evolution of the use of colors in his paintings.
After a brief period of adjustment, Dossena finds a position with the Studio Berger, restoring several works of past masters. The need to reproduce the correct stroke techniques and the various gradations of works assigned to him, in addition to his isolation from the society around him, caused by the inability to converse in English, unconsciously influences both the process of the color and its intensity in the New York production.

The artist chooses, at this stage of his life, to abandon the Neo-Impressionism, but does so gradually and without any intention of embracing new movements. One can recognize, in his work of those early years of the seventies, unique, almost exclusive characteristics. The brushwork is more energetic, no longer linked to the need to reproduce any static truth that presents itself before his eyes. The subjects are never repetitive, seeking a more simplified figurative, almost essential, without schematics or structural limitation. The shape is almost torn from nature, always looking to contain and interpret the existential essence and express these new, uncontrollable feelings that the artist feels, away from the beloved homeland. New York and America have on Dossena a similar effect to that experienced by his friend Mario Soldati many years before. He loves the America of the skyscrapers, museums and differences. He loves his countrymen, who are just like him, sailors without a boat in an indefinite odyssey that consists of small episodes and great sacrifices. But he hates being classified as Italian American, recognizing that this term is used to define a set of stereotypes to which he feels he has no affinity to. He finds himself faced with the eternal dilemma of the emigrant: to fit without being absorbed. The artist uses all its energy, amplified by his hate-love relationship with New York to create explosive works, whose sole purpose is to express a need to return to see the beautiful colors of his Italy.

What he calls the lack of color of Italian American society, the work of many gray ants concerned only to cram their food storage, exacerbates him and reinforces his power to paint with a color table increasingly explosive. The form becomes just an excuse to express color and their fusion becomes the expression of the artist, almost a liberation, researched and planned, but never artificial nor contrived.
In 1976 he returns to Italy, with a creative wealth based on artistic experimentation and newfound inspiration, and the direct and close contact with various Rembrandt, Renoir and Picasso. In a short time his painting are inspired and impressed by the beautiful Italian landscapes and he finds himself to paint in a style by many defined as Neo-Impressionist: the intensity of the palette remains, but his interest lies in reproducing reality quite literally. His aesthetic awareness is but intensified by other considerations, result of experience with his expressionistic canvas. Consequently, the visual impact to the observer is remarkable. His landscapes acquire an overt vitality that reflects the Neo-Impressionist period for the form, combined with the physically powerful colors of his neo-expressionism.

The artist has arrived to close the creative cycle just when the Leukemia begins to take away the physical possibilities of painting. His last work is the portrait of his nephew William, impressive for its brightness. Frustrated by the inability to create on canvas, Dossena is dedicated to writing poetry that recalls the lyrical intensity of his later paintings. Many awards, both for poetry and for painting, brighten up the last years of the artist’s life. The Degree of Doctor Honoris Causa and the request to sign the famous “Muretto” of Alassio, unfortunately, come posthumously.

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