(Brisighella, Ravenna 1899 – Florence, 1934), painter and engraver, moved to Florence in the early 1900s and worked as a futurist in the years from 1915 to 1919. He formed friendships with Carrà and especially with Soffici and Conti with whom he began to experiment with the decomposition, deformation and synthesis of objects and the figure. In his early drawings and etchings futurism merges with cubism to arrive in the 1920s at experimentation with a painting that can be considered the forerunner of aeropainting codified in 1929. Together with Conti he was part of the group of painters in “L’Italia futurista” and in 1919 he collaborated on Conti and Pavolini’s “Centone” with a group of woodcuts and participated in the Great National Futurist Exposition (Milan, Genoa, Florence) with numerous works including “Portrait (geometric synthesis of masses),” “Tram+lights of a street,” “Atmospheric sensations and noises of an airplane.” In 1919, although he painted new Futurist paintings, his avant-garde research began to fade. Soffici’s return from the war his ‘ideal teacher’ determined his adherence to the “return to order” that united him with almost all the other members of the Florentine Futurist group.
The Achille Lega Papers are divided into the following sections: Correspondence, which collects missives sent to the artist regarding invitations to exhibitions, sales, awards, numerous condolences that reached the family on the artist’s death, and a testimonial from Soffici attached to a 1934 letter; Achilles alloy works reproduced in the periodical “The Savage”, a series of drawings and an etching; Press clippings, collection of League articles on exhibitions and contemporary artists; Catalogs with the presence of works by Lega, series of publications from the 1920s to the 1970s; Library, catalogs on Achille Lega by Raffaele De Grada and Sigfrido Bartolini; Miscellaneous, which collects information material on exhibitions and events in which Lega’s works were presented, and “Achille Lega 1899-1934” epigraph dictated by Giovanni Papini, etchings by Achille Lega, “I libretti di Mal’Aria,” 276, June 1980.
