Pierre Ambrogiani, The Lively Street, Oil on Canvas, 1970s

Pierre Ambrogiani was born in Ajaccio in 1907. He quickly moved to the continent, and at the age of 12, he was already a “little telegraph operator” in Marseille.

Nothing artistic in his education: Pierre Ambrogiani is an autodidact, who will learn alone the effects of material and colors on the canvas. Friend of René Seyssaud and Auguste Chabaud, his talented elders, like them, he was inspired by the flashes of Fauvism to bring his work to life: Provençal landscapes, still lifes, reapers, bullfighters or nudes, all are pretexts for color.

An intensity increased by the thickness of the material with which he saturates the support, with a knife, sometimes even with a trowel. Ambrogiani is not frightened by the juxtaposition of violent and explosive colors. Few painters apart from him have been so insolent towards the established “good taste”, which is careful not to mix so many saturated hues on the same support.

Frequenting the Old Port district, where he has his workshop, Ambro is a true Marseille figure. It was at the Péano bar that the painters Pascal Ambrogiani and Toussaint d'Orcino, the poet Toursky, the artists Serra, Ferrari, Gianelli and others gathered around him and his brothers.

For the fifty years of his career, in 1973, the city of Marseille paid tribute to the painter by organizing a major retrospective exhibition at the Vieille Charité museum. Pierre Ambrogiani died in 1985 in Marseille.