In 1915, while the First World War was dissolving European certainties, Alberto Magnelli painted a series of works in Florence that abandoned representation entirely. His Composizioni (Compositions) of that year, made in direct response to Matisse and the developments he had witnessed in Paris, placed him at the furthest edge of Italian modernism two decades before abstraction became a self-conscious movement in his home country.

Born in Florence in 1888, Magnelli spent time in Paris in the early twentieth century before returning to Italy, where the Composizioni emerged in 1915. He then largely set abstraction aside. The sustained return came in the 1930s: in 1935 he was included in the landmark grouping of Italian non-figurative painters at the second Quadriennale in Rome, the first occasion on which Bogliardi, Ghiringhelli, Reggiani, Licini, Soldati, and Magnelli exhibited together as a collective front. The records note that Magnelli was 'living in Paris' by then: he had already relocated and would remain there for the rest of his life.

In Paris he moved in the circle of Hans Arp and Sonia and Robert Delaunay. He was among the first to identify Nicolas de Stael's talent, alongside Arp and the Delaunays, encouraging the young Russian-born painter before he had found an audience.

His output is catalogued in Anne Maisonnier's catalogue raisonne, Alberto Magnelli: L'Oeuvre peint, published in Paris in 1975. A centenary exhibition was held at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1988. He died in 1971.