Between Brushstrokes and Dreams

Antonietta Raphaël’s husband Mario Mafai liked to call her “The foreigner passing through.” She was Jewish, born in Lithuania in 1895, but established her residence and studio after the age of thirty in Rome, where she recently received a fitting tribute with a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. While visiting the exhibition, Dacia Maraini stopped at a painting of two little girls. It is often the narrative element of a painting that captures a writer’s attention, and Maraini seemed to explore the possibilities for a story by posing a series of questions to the girls in the painting. Of course, they offered no answers, but the process helped to establish a sense of intimacy and complicity with Raphaël’s art, which Maraini describes as an intertwining of “tiny upside-down truths, bold tracts of color, and prolonged, wide-ranging reflection.”