The amazing details of Antonietta Raphaël portraits

By Noa Jurmann*

Ever since I was little, I have loved art: going to museums, walking through all of the different exhibits, strolling leisurely through the brightly lit halls, and gazing at the different types of art: sculptures, landscape paintings, abstract art, and so much more; taking breaks to grab a snack and talking about everything I’ve seen there. As a child, when my family would go on vacation to Europe in the summers, my favorite part was always visiting different art museums everywhere we went and getting to experience contrasting styles of art depending on the country and the artist. I have always loved how each artist is distinct and unique f. My favorite museums to visit were always the art museums in Italy. I always preferred them because there seemed to be more of a variety of types of art than in other countries. Despite their variety, there is a dearth of female and Jewish artists in Italian museums, but that does not mean that they didn’t exist.
One artist, Antonietta Raphaël Mafai, was a particularly influential Italian artist. Antonietta Raphaël was born in Kovno, Lithuania in 1895, the daughter of a rabbi. When her father died in 1905, she and her mother moved to London, and she eventually settled in Rome in 1924, where she met and married the Italian artist Mario Mafai. According to an interview with her daughter, Raphaël Mafai was an artist first and a mother second. She devoted her life to her art and believed that art is influenced by the stories and emotions that we experience as children, which can be seen in her pieces.
Although she was not religious, she treasured her Jewish culture and traditions and drew upon them in some of her art. Her daughter talks about how she was a free spirit, and yet how her art reflected her Jewish culture and who she was as a person. Many of her pieces convey a sense of fleeing and escaping, which is a common theme in Jewish history all over the world. For almost as long as Jews have existed, they have been fleeing from one country to another. They have been persecuted almost everywhere they have lived, and because of this, many Jewish artists attempt to convey this theme in their work.
Two portraits represent well Raphaël Mafai’s approach. “Helenita Olivares suona la viola” (c. 1960) depicts the young Colombian soprano playing the cello in front of a garden. The colors are striking: Olivares wears a pink floral dress and she sits on a blue and green lawn chair focusing intently on the task at hand.
There is an astonishing amount of details on the canvas, from the subject’s facial expression to her floral dress, to the backdrop. Behind Olivares is a garden with trees dancing in the wind, a red brick wall surrounding the garden, and what seems to be the wall of a building. The building diagonal from the garden is filled with light blues, purples, and pinks, and to me, it looks like Mafai intentionally painted clouds on the outside of the building. Maybe she is trying to convey that the Columbian woman’s head is in the clouds.
As in much of Mafai’s work, there are both vibrant and pale colors; a focal point in the front of the painting, with the rest of the piece centered around this point. A lot of her work has vibrant colors and some are abstract, but nothing is out of place: everything seems like it belongs.
In another one of her pieces, “Father’s Portrait,” she depicts her father in a black hat and suit, in front of a colorful background, surrounded by blues, reds, and gold; although thoroughly abstract the vivid tones seem to create depth, pushing her father forward in the portrait.
The background colors give her father somewhat of a silhouette highlighting his figure. The powerful and abstract colors seem to place her father in an intense and undefined space between worlds, as if to convey the importance of her father to her, both when he was alive and now, even in death. The blue and gold background behind her father could be interpreted as the splitting of the Red Sea, the intense reds above her father’s right shoulder the burning bush – two pivotal stories that mark turning points in the story of the Jewish people.

Above, Helenita Olivares suona la viola (c. 1960).

*This piece is part of a series of articles written by students of Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania, USA, enrolled in a course on the history and culture of Jewish Italy, taught by Dr. Daniel Leisawitz, Assistant Professor of Italian and Director of the Muhlenberg College Italian Studies Program.