Saint Martin
SEE IT IN PERSON
● On view now — Collection Gallery, Room 22, West Wall
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia · verified July 2026
Discussion
FROM THE BARNES FOUNDATION’S CATALOG
Afro Basaldella was an Italian painter active mainly in Venice and Rome. Here, he employed a semiabstract, openwork version of cubism to depict the moment when Saint Martin (d. 397)—a Roman knight who became the celebrated bishop of Tours—sliced his cloak in two to share it with a beggar. Afro's lucidly geometric composition imagines a rapprochement between classicism and modernism while speaking to his interest in metaphysics and inner experience. Two of the works with which this painting is displayed in the Barnes Foundation attest to two of Afro's most important inspirations during the late 1940s: the paintings of Paul Klee and the sculptures of his brother Mirko.
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