His portraits, scenes of everyday life, still lifes, and landscapes make Clemente Tafuri a landmark of Neapolitan realism. His energetic and lively painting and exuberant chromatism successfully spread his works in Italy and abroad.
1903
1971
Pittore
Clemente Tafuri was born in Salerno in 1903 and trained in the workshop of an ornatista from Salerno; he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, where he excelled from the start in painting with original strokes and vivid chromaticism. He was heir to the color and light of the mid-nineteenth-century Neapolitan school; he also studied carefully the seventeenth century and Caravaggio.
His energetic painting reflected his determined and restless personality, which led him to travel extensively throughout Italy, especially during the years of World War II. He would stay in Fiume, Milan, Rome and Ravello as well as in his Salerno to settle permanently in Genoa where he died in 1971.
During his career, he participated in several exhibitions and won numerous awards. Solo exhibitions are dedicated to him in Rome, Genoa, Naples, Cannes, Lausanne and Marseille.
Between the 1940s and 1950s he collaborated as an illustrator for the “Domenica del Corriere.” In 1950 he executed a series of history paintings for the council chamber of the town hall of Cava dei Tirreni. In Salerno, in 1970, a year before his death, a large anthological exhibition was organized in the Salone dei Marmi of the City Hall. Several of his works are preserved in the Vatican Museums, in the City Hall of Cava dei Tirreni, and in the Palazzo dei Crociati in Milan. A St. Matthew made by Clemente Tafuri in 1936 was donated by the city of Salerno for the taking of Ethiopia and is now in the cathedral in Addis Ababa.
