Mechanical Woman, 1927

The artist Guglielmo Sansoni adopted the name Tato in 1920 and soon became one of the leading figures of the post-World War I wave of Italian Futurism. After meeting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, he played a central role in shaping Futurist visual culture, co-authoring the 1930 Futurist Manifesto of Photography and helping to define Futurism’s photographic ambitions. His wide-ranging practice encompassed painting, graphic design, sculpture, ceramics, and photography. His photographic work embraced experimentation with photomontage, unusual perspectives, and the transformation of everyday objects into anthropomorphic forms. In both Il Perfetto Borghese (The Perfect Bourgeois) (lot 57), and Mechanical Woman (lot 35), Tato combines humor and Surrealist-inflected invention, establishing himself as a distinctive voice within avant-garde photography in Italy.