Artistic Works

To sum up Keller’s artistic career we ought to start with her artistic delopment following the school of Lombard Naturalism, interpreted in those years by artists such as Filippo Carcano and Mosè Bianchi. Pompeo Mariani, her “spiritual father”, and Stefano Bersani, her actual master, were among those who led this artistic movement to its fulfillment (quite late in the 1900s); Giovanni Carnovali was its earliest leading light. Yet, in her untiring work to consolidate her identity as an artist, the ideas put forward at that period by the avant-garde such as Plastic Values and the Novecento group were quite close to her thinking as a painter. In this diversified artistic pot-pourri Keller appropriated some elements she found more congenial – at the expense of others: she followed the road, for example, of synthetic instead of magic Realism, she chose a poetic sublimation of the everyday rather than primitivist trends, and maintained a consistent attachment to Naturalism remote from Metaphysics. From this path she never deviated, keeping  “form” and “volume” as fundamental aesthetic media at the center of her research. In the words of an article about an exhibition in 1941, we could say that “with Keller’s art tradition was united – albeit with caution – with modernism”