UTW 64

Storm clouds over Piedmont – Homage to Italian anti-Fascist partisan Sandro Delmastro

Art: 2016
Mosaic-drawing combo
51 inches H x 42 W.

The drawing was begun April 17, 2016. The artist began w/ a light pencil sketch of Delmastro, a young Italian who was a chemistry studies classmate and a hiking buddy of Primo Levi. The photo Segan drew from is very dark and was a creative challenge for the artist to work from. Delmastro hailed from Serra d’Ivrea; I believe this is the region around the town of Ivrea in northwest Italy’s Piedmontese area; Ivrea in the city of Turin.

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The mosaic tile-making, beginning with the sky at upper left and right, and left and lower left, began on June 18, 2016.

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Segan did the drawing portrait from a photo of Delmastro seated on a rock ledge pinnacle high up and overlooking a valley. The photo may have been taken by Primo Levi on one of their hikes in mountains outside of Turin.

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Sometime between 1943 and 1945, during the years of the Nazi occupation of northern Italy and Mussolini’s last years in power, if truncated at that time, with the Republic of Saló, aka the Italian Social Republic (Italian: Repubblica Sociale Italiana), Delmastro, while attempting to escape from the Fascist Party house in the city of Cuneo* was shot in the back of the neck by "...a monstrous child-executioner, one of those wretched murderers of fifteen whom Mussolini's Republic of Saló recruited in the reformatories." (quote in the chapter 'Iron,' in The Periodic Table / by Primo Levi © Schocken Books, NY,1984; Il Sistema Periodico © Giuilio Einaudi editore SpA, Torino, 1975).
*Cuneo is a city in the Piedmont region, northwest Italy.

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Primo Levi, born in Turin in 1919, was an Italian Jewish chemist, anti-Fascist activist, an Auschwitz death-camp slave labor survivor, and after WWII, a world acclaimed author. He wrote of surviving Auschwitz and other Holocaust themed books. His other writing included poetry and even sci-fi.

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When Delmastro was 20 (I think and Levi were close in age) they went on a very ambitious and difficult mountain hike; among others. (Levi was born in 1919).

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The story of one particular hiking trip in the mountains was beautifully recounted by Levi in the chapter Iron in his book The Periodic Table (In Italian: Il sistema periodico

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The drawing includes artified pencil sketches Segan drew of birds in W. Palm Beach, Florida (1991); and 2 plant sketches done on a hike to the Commonwealth Basin, Cascades mountains (2009); and 2 people seated at a dock at Greenlake, a park and lake in Seattle, 1992. Also in the drawing are artified ink drawings of the cliff side at the outside of the Big Four Ice Caves, Cascasdes mountains, east of Seattle (around 2001-2); and sheep, seagulls and a rocky cliff drawn during  a coastal hike north of Newburgh, Scotland, 2015.

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The drawing of the horse was inspired by a color photo of a horse called an avelignese. Its origins are in Italy, as described on page 188 in the book The Encyclopedia of Horses & Ponies, edited by Tamsin Pickeral (Barnes & Noble, NY, 2003). An excellent reference book about horses, of which I knew little ‘til I began perusing the book, which I bought at a Goodwill store in Seattle in early June 2016.

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There is a rock at bottom center of the mosaic. I had picked it up on the beach in the small town of Bar, in Montenegro, Croatia, in 1985.

From Bar I carried it in my luggage, probably a backpack, late summer '85, in a bus to Dubrovnik; then  I rode a ferry to Corfu, n.w. Greece, then back to Yugoslavia 2 weeks later. I later rode on a 48 hour ferry to Trieste, then buses onto Vienna and eventually back to Krakow. After my post-grad fellowship at the Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow, vanished that September, I trained through Silesia and thru Germany and onto Paris, then to Barcelona, back to Paris and from there to New York and by December that year,  back home in Seattle. Between 1985 and 2016 I lived in several different homes: A well-travelled rock! Its placement in the Delmastro mosaic is a spiritual return to Europe, which, sadly, is now, in 2018, under grievous threat from a resurgence of Fascism across the continent.

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While Sandro Delmastro was not a victim of the Nazis (and thus not a Holocaust victim) he was a victim of murderous Fascism in Italy. As a pal of Primo Levi, I chose Delmastro as a subject for the tolerance education goals of the Under the Wings (and the companion Sight-seeing with Dignity human rights) art series. His portrait is the third work in the Under the Wings series portraying a victim of Fascism and Fascists. The other 2 victims were Jewish, but they were not Holocaust victims:

Under the Wings UTW 48:  Italian-Jewish resistance hero Eugenio Curiel, Castel sant' angelo & my flying Chi, Obi Jew-Jew Kenobi. He was beaten to death by men, thugs, from the paramilitary Brigate Nere (English: Black Brigades), run by the Republican Fascist Party. They operated under the Nazi military puppet government that installed Mussolini’s government in northern Italy called the Italian Social Republic, or The Republic of Saló.

These were the same Fascist murderers who had arrested Delmastro, in the same region, northwest Italy. 

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Under the Wings 59: Mira Steiner of Zagreb. A young Croatian Jewish woman born in 1922, she was murdered by Ustashi Fascists on the island of Pag, Croatia, in 1942.

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A 13 min., 56 video overview of the artwork.

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A  3 min., 3 sec overview of the artwork, focusing mainly on the drawing.

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Some source imagery in the artwork (6 min., 55 sec)