Franco Rognoni was born in Milan on 20 September 1913. He grew up in a petty bourgeois family which, due to unfortunate vicissitudes, went from a moderate economic condition to a very difficult standard of living. Rognoni, who has always shown a great passion for drawing and painting since he was a child, had to give up cultivating this interest to graduate as a textile expert and then work at the Istituto Cotoniero Italiano. This experience, to his great relief, was short-lived and he began attending evening classes at the Scuola Superiore d'Arte of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan where the painter Gianfilippo Usellini taught Applied Art. His artistic training, almost entirely self-taught, led him to enjoy and understand the new art forms very early and to love artists such as Modigliani, Sironi, Licini and the foreigners Picasso, Chagall, Rouault, Beckmann, Grosz, Klee, Kokoschka .
The turning point in his artistic training took place by frequenting the very rich library of the art critic Raffaello Giolli where, through reproductions, he studied the work of foreign artists who enthused and stimulated him much more than that of the Italian tradition studied in the academies. It was precisely the critic Giolli who saw in the young Rognoni a talent worthy of consideration. Giolli's opinion was shared by Franco Ciliberti, an intellectual attentive to new forms of art, who showed esteem for this young man by revealing his qualities. After the disappearance of these critics, the meeting with the entrepreneur Giovanni Botta, a lover of drawings, engravings and ex-libris, is significant. He commissions him an impressive illustrative work of some of the main masterpieces of European literature (The Betrothed, the Comedy, the poems of Carlo Porta, Don Quixote, Les Miserables).
An independent artist, Rognoni sets out on a solitary journey away from the seduction of the new avant-gardes, elaborating his world in the continuous search for a personal language.
This is a period of second thoughts during which he alternates and develops methods of different cultures and, at the end of the Second World War, Rognoni finds himself in a conflictual situation: on the one hand he is driven by a strong motivation to participate, with his own work , to political and social movements, on the other hand, due to his tendentially pessimistic vision, deeply affected by the atomic event, he considers the function of art and of painting in particular to be exhausted, especially that of an easel.
Consequently he falls into an existential crisis which he overcomes by dedicating himself temporarily to illustration for publishing, to the drawing of political commitment and costume with his debut.
His various experiences and above all the intense activity that came from collaborating with others in the theater and in publishing, help him get out of both existential and artistic loneliness. His painting that appeared dark, tormented, sometimes overloaded, becomes less obsessive, acquiring freer forms inspired by a fantastic vision soothed by ironic flashes where his unmistakable arabesque drawing the color application obtaining a particular esprit de finesse that becomes the his digit.
Franco Rognoni, after more than sixty years of uninterrupted artistic life, died in Milan on 11 March 1999 and is buried in the Luino cemetery in the family tomb.
