Antonietta Raphaël was born in Kaunas in 1895 despite her declaring herself to be five years younger. The youngest child of Rabbi Simon Raphaël, coming after thirteen sons, she lost her father during the winter of 1903. Her thirteen brothers were all tailors and had moved to London before Antonietta. Presumably in 1905, she moved to London with her mother Katia (née Horowitz).
Antonietta studied music and made a living by embroidering. After her mother’s death in 1919, she settled in Rome where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts and in particular the life class.
After attaining a diploma in piano, Antonietta mostly taught music and became a frequent visitor to the British Museum, where she was particularly fascinated by Egyptian sculptures. In London she soon met the sculptor Jacob Epstein, but she herself started drawing only in 1918. In fact, she was totally devoted to music and, having a good voice, to singing.
In Rome her husband Mafai shared his studio in via Cavour with another painter, Gino Bonichi, known as Scipione. Raphaël, Mafai and Scipione soon joined into an artistic companionship, which became so well established that art critic Roberto Longhi named it the “School of via Cavour.” Their style was characterized by a special visionarism, the use of a bright palette and the warm tonalism which later characterized the so-called “Roman School.” Imbued with memories of Jewish rites, Raphaël’s painting was expressionistic in style and rich in Fauvist coloring. Of the three artists, she was the most inclined to a burning imagination, so much so that she had often and incorrectly been perceived as the very inspirer of the “School of via Cavour."
Artists of the time mostly employed the “Novecento” style, a revisitation of fifteenth and sixteenth century art displayed at several exhibitions in Italy and abroad, which was favored by the art critic Margherita Sarfatti and strongly supported by Mussolini. Raphaël, Mafai and Scipione were clearly inspired by totally different ideas. Raphaël’s paintings were seen for the first time in Rome in 1929 at the first Exhibition of the Fascist Syndicates, where her "Landscape" was shown alongside two paintings by Mafai, "Sunset" and "Sunset on the Lungotevere."
In February 1930, after the birth of their third daughter, Giulia, Raphaël and Mafai left for Paris. She stayed for four years, with short visits to Rome and London, where Epstein unsuccessfully tried to exhibit her work at the Redfern Gallery. In Paris Raphaël met Chagall, who thought her art was still unripe and advised her not to exhibit there for the moment. In the French capital, the couple lived in poverty. She tried to earn by again giving piano lessons, taught English and sold her embroideries. Very often there was almost nothing to eat.
After Mafai’s return to Rome, Raphaël started studying sculpture, as a way to avoid domestic conflicts. From that moment on Raphaël devoted herself mainly to sculpture. Although she loved stone, she made terracottas, cements, and bronzes. Her preferred subjects were her daughters like in paintings "Sleeping Myriam", "Simona and her brush", "Giulia’s Portrait and The three sisters", and "Simona’s Portrait and Giulia’s Head", though dramatic works are not missing. Her sculptures are characterized by full, rounded shapes, possibly echoing the French sculptor Aristide Maillol, to whose work she turned with a sensitivity far from academicism.
To avoid Raphaël’s exile after the Fascist anti-Jewish laws were passed in November, 1938 the entire family left Rome in July 1939 and took refuge in Genoa, at the home of the Jewish art collector Emilio Jesi and Alberto Della Ragione, who allowed Raphaël and her daughters to live safely till the end of World War II, while Mario was enlisted in the army in 1942. Antonietta’s portraits of Emilio Jesi and Lucia Rodocanachi belong to this sad period as does a new version of her "Tyrannicide."
After the war, Raphaël took part in important exhibitions, such as the 1948 National Survey of Figurative Arts held at the Rome National Gallery of Modern Art, where she showed "Self-portrait" and "Genesis" under the name De Simon Raphaël, thus adding her father’s given name to that of her family. She was also invited to the XXIV Biennale in Venice, where she exhibited "The three sisters" — a chalk of 1947. In 1950 she was again at the Biennale with three chalks. The following year she showed two terracottas, "Portrait of Dr. Jesi" and "The little girl singing", and two bronzes, "Portrait of painter Mafai" and "Portrait of painter Guttuso", and at the VI Quadriennial Exhibition, where she was awarded one of the prizes for sculpture.
In addition to exhibiting at the Biennales of 1952 and 1954, Raphaël participated in several competitions for monuments. In 1956 she toured China and exhibited in Peking with a number of Italian artists. Invited to the VIII Quadriennial in 1959, she exhibited twelve works under the name Raphaël, adding “De Simon” in parentheses. After her husband’s death in 1965, she felt increasingly impelled to paint. Now at last under the name Antonietta Raphaël, her works were displayed at many exhibitions, amongst which Modern Art in Italy in 1915 – 1935 is noteworthy. Curated by art critic and historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, the exhibition was held in 1967 at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. It was followed by Contemporary Italian Sculptors, a traveling exhibition curated by the Quadriennial which opened at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in November 1968 and toured Cairo, Teheran, Lisbon, Cologne, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Hakone, Japan with its last stop in Malta in 1977. During her last five years, Raphaël painted a number of large works. In 1975 she was hospitalized in a Roman hospital and died three days later in her sleep.
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Ritratto di Mafai
Still Life with Guitar
L’Arco
Gladiolo
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Mafai con il gatto
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La ópera
Fanciulla con la bocca rossa
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Re David piange la morte di Absalon
Niobe
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Figura femminile
Caltagirone all’alba
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Self-portrait with violin
Mafai con i pennelli
Self-portrait
Adolescente
Desnudo femenino ante el espejo
Antonietta was an artist characterized by a profound anti-academic conviction, also affirmed by her sculptures which, especially after World War II, dominated her output.
Antonietta Raphaël Mafai is recalled by her daughters as a woman and artist who was "mysterious and fascinating, severe and inflexible, affectionate and at the same time remote, withholding. Invincible."
In Rome, Antonietta met a Roman painter, Mario Mafai, younger than herself, with whom she started a lifelong relationship. Only much later, on July 20, 1935, would they get married. Early in 1926 she gave birth to their first daughter, Myriam, and in 1928 to Simona. In February 1930, they gave birth to their third daughter, Giulia.
