AUDIOGUIDA MOSTRA Figure del ’900

AUDIOGUIDA / AUDIOGUIDE

Figure del ’900. Da Balla a Severini, de Chirico e Oppi.

Opere dalle Collezioni Gallerie d’Italia – Intesa Sanpaolo

a

The aim of the exhibition is to trace, with no claim to being exhaustive, some significant episodes in Italian painting that, roughly in the first half of the twentieth century, experimented with different styles and languages while remaining faithful to the mimesis of reality, however variously inflected. Hence, too, the choice of title, which plays on the double meaning of the Italian word figura, alluding both to an iconic, figurative approach and to the various personalities under consideration.

The thirty works selected from the Collezioni Gallerie d’Italia – Intesa Sanpaolo date from 1908 — with a small, extraordinary masterpiece by the pre-Futurist Boccioni — to the early 1950s; only the closing canvas, by Sciltian, extends slightly beyond this time span, dating from 1955–1961.

The exhibition itinerary is at once chronological, critical, thematic and geographical, and pursues a twofold aim: to give due recognition to experiences and figures too long regarded as marginal, or confined almost to the rank of local or regional testimony, and to highlight the vitality of researches that were anything but outdated — an understanding of which, indeed, allows us to grasp more fully the complexity of Italian artistic expression across a crucial fifty-year span.

An important role was played by the “Novecento” group, driven by the critic Margherita Sarfatti, who as early as 1919 placed the concepts of “synthesis”, “composition” and “non-fragmentary construction” at the centre of her thinking, calling for a return to volume and figure — to be developed, however, not in a naturalistic sense but in an essential, synthetic one, with particular attention to the geometric structure of the image. These are principles we see exemplified by Oppi in the monumental, stylized Idillio cadorino (Cadore Idyll), placed, not by chance, at the opening of the exhibition.

a

The itinerary opens with a painting by Boccioni from 1908 (the Manifesto del Futurismo would be published by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti the following year): it belongs to a series of views painted from life in the countryside east of Milan, and shows a technique derived from Divisionism, though applied with stylistic freedom. The exhibition then moves to a brief but telling focus on how the female subject was treated in the years just after the First World War (1919–1926), respectively by Orell from Trieste, tied to the legacy of the Munich Secession, by Noci from Rome, by Spadini from Florence and by Oppi from Bologna. These are opposing models of womanhood: one in the manner of Franz von Stuck, somewhat unsettling yet softened in expression by the work’s “affective” content (it is a portrait of the artist’s wife beside his dog). The other is the model created by Noci, who by 1926 had already been settled in the United States for three years, where he portrayed modern women, dressed in the latest fashion, almost stylized through their elegant accessories. Spadini brings to life a figure at once delicate and monumental, presented in the guise of a Virgin and Child, though in truth we are looking at his wife Pasqualina, portrayed with their young son Lillo (Raffaele) and daughter Anna. Oppi, finally, with his refined woman in profile painted in 1926, comes closest to the dictates of Margherita Sarfatti’s “Novecento”, a milieu to which Costetti, from Reggio Emilia, with his imposing portrait of the sculptor Marino Marini, and Funi, from Ferrara, also belong — the latter combining references to Titianesque models (note the draped curtain in the background) with a taste for the non-finito.

a

The founding nucleus of the “Novecento” group is formed by Marussig, from Trieste, and Bucci, from the Marche: the former approaches the theme of the city through the schematic linearism of his Milanese landscape, while the latter draws on elements linked to the late nineteenth-century French tradition, combined with a photographic cut to the image.
Sironi stands apart, represented here by a composition of striking illustrative effectiveness, not without humour — belying the gloom usually associated with the Sardinian painter’s style — and bright even in its colours. It may well be a sketch for a satirical cartoon intended for the monthly supplement of the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia.
A further chapter is formed by the artists who, having come from Futurism, had by the 1930s moved on to modes far removed from the avant-garde: Severini and Balla. The former, in Natura morta con gallo e pesci (Still Life with Cockerel and Fish), creates a work charged with vital energy, its dazzling brushstrokes recalling Roman imperial-age painting and revealing his intention to read the classical world in a modern key. Balla, meanwhile, in Magnolie che si specchiano (Magnolias Reflected), builds a play of reflections and transparencies. This is no simple return to order, but a shift toward a language that has absorbed the analysis of light from his Futurist years, transforming the traditional genre of the floral still life into a fruitful pretext for exploring nuances of colour.
The exhibition also aims to explore geographical areas on the margins of the usual surveys: hence the Abruzzo of Cascella, whose Pascolo (Pasture) is a rugged, powerful masterpiece, both in its mountain setting and in the vigour of its composition — an ensemble of elements that points, in an original way, to the idea of the primordial.
Tito, although born near Naples, moved early on to Venice, and his panel Ragazzi con asinello (Boys with a Little Donkey) is a delightful genre piece set in the Brenta area: an idyllic scene with a popular subject, simple in inspiration, rendered with a precise and lively brushstroke.

a

a

Gigiotti Zanini trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and was initially close to the Futurist circle of the journal Lacerba. From 1919 he was active in Milan as an architect, working in an elegant, measured classicist style. This dimension of his output is also reflected in his painting, which evolved from the fable-like primitivism of his early works into, within a Novecento context, compositions marked by solid structure and a pronounced sense of perspective.
He remains an unjustly overlooked figure — an artist and designer from Trentino who was among the most original and distinctive voices of his time. The works on display comprise four oils on canvas and panel dating between 1933 and 1949, ranging from still life to view painting and urban scenes, all pervaded by a clear yet subtly estranged atmosphere: from the suspended, metaphysical-primitivist melancholy of Porto (Harbour) to the wholly cerebral, neo-Quattrocento rigor of Paese toscano (Tuscan village), through to the post-war works — a Parma reimagined in a magical-fantastical key and transformed into an abstract, unreal city, and an enigmatic Natura morta (Still Life) set against a landscape that may be the Chianti countryside. Zanini proves himself, time and again, a surprising and refined artist, capable of concealing meaning and allusion within apparently straightforward compositions.

a

The “regional” narrative continues with a closer look at the Lombard painters Semeghini and Tosi, united by their shared choice of landscape as a genre. The former offers us a dreamlike Venice, not unmindful of the work with a similar setting painted by Renoir during his Italian journey of 1881, though distinguished by a soft, delicate palette, almost evanescent in tone. Tosi’s Paesaggio in Val Seriana (Landscape in Val Seriana) is decidedly Lombard, both in its typical naturalistic intimacy and in its subject matter, faithful to the lessons of Post-Impressionism — and Cézanne in particular — yet worked out with classical framing and Novecento solidity.
The Neapolitan area, by contrast, is represented by Siviero, Ciani and Brancaccio. Sogni (Dreams), by the first of these, is a remarkable painting for its bare, austere setting, which recalls the canvases by Prencipe depicting the convent of Sant’Anna in Orvieto. Melancholy is the defining trait of Ciani’s Donna al balcone (Woman at the Balcony), one of the artist’s most accomplished works: born in Naples in 1910, he would leave Italy in 1950 to settle in California. Portrayed in profile and rendered in muted tones, the painting’s subject bows her head, as if gazing outward in a pensive mood. Brancaccio found in the depiction of female subjects one of his favourite themes, and in his Donna (Woman) he displays both a rich range of colour and a serene plasticity in the rendering of the figure, able to embrace a poetics of the real with freedom, joining formal synthesis to introspective refinement.
Standing apart is the cosmopolitan de Chirico, represented here by one of his proverbial, enigmatic “horses by the sea” — a subject he took up from the 1920s onward, when, in an already largely post-metaphysical phase, he developed differing notions of his own idea of classicism, devising new iconographic motifs often shot through with an unprecedented surreal or enigmatic vein.

a

The “regional” itinerary closes with the Florentine painters Rosai and Soffici, each with his own distinctive poetics. The former, driven by a passionate search for the authentic character of his city and its surrounding countryside, managed to capture, without rhetoric, the humble realism of villages inhabited by ordinary people; here he gives us the figure of an old woman immersed in an abstract, suspended atmosphere. The latter is represented by a painting evoking the familiar landscape around Poggio a Caiano; Soffici had been among the champions of a conservative “return to order”, marked by an exaltation of the Tuscan Quattrocento tradition (though without forgetting the lessons of Cézanne learned in Paris).
Although most of the works on display date from the 1920s and 1930s, with Soffici we have already moved into 1949, and the post-war years rightly deserve their own attention. Hence the view of the basilica of San Lorenzo by the Roman painter Mafai, rendered with a dense pictorial matter and vivid colourism. The building still bears the scars of wartime bombing, rising to become an emblem of a collective state of mind, caught between the disorientation of destruction and the vital drive of reconstruction. Trombadori, formerly associated with the Scuola Romana (he had moved to the capital from his native Sicily), depicts in his Marina (Seascape) a glimpse of the Porto Grande of Syracuse, captured in a timeless dimension, with the solid volumes of the houses, precise drawing and flat, muted colour fields.
The itinerary concludes with a painting by the Russian-Armenian — later Italianized — artist Sciltian, celebrated in his lifetime and only recently rescued from a long period of neglect thanks to a handful of exhibitions. Recurring features in his work are traditional composition, the architectural structuring of both scene and figures, and a rarefied atmosphere, all resulting in a cold and at times unsettling naturalism. In Mardi gras (Shrove Tuesday), the mannequin is a homage to de Chirico, though the stylistic register points instead to Magic Realism.

a

Thank you for your visit!