A Hans Arp work that had been lost track of resurfaces in Florence. And now it is being exhibited

Larme de galaxie (1962) is a small masterpiece by Hans Ar p (or Jean Arp; Strasbourg, 1886 - Basel, 1966), one of the great masters of the 20th century, resurfaced from the deposits of the Florentine Civic Museums. The work, donated by the Alsatian artist’s wife to the city of Florence in the aftermath of the dramatic flood of 1966, returns to light after about three years of study and research conducted by Emanuele Greco, curator of the exhibition Jean Arp. Larme de galaxie, scheduled from Nov. 11, 2022 to Feb. 15, 2023 at the Museo Novecento in Florence.

The duralumin sculpture created by Arp in 1962 , a unicum in the artist’s sculptural production, was donated to the city of Florence thanks to the generosity of the artist’s wife, Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, who in 1967, in the aftermath of the flood, responded with this significant tribute to the appeal made to contemporary artists by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. Today, nearly sixty years after its only appearance at the Schwarz Gallery in Milan (1965), it returns to view in a public exhibition. The sculpture is placed in close dialogue with Leone Minassian ’s (1905-1978) 1963 painting Forma in elevazione and ideally links up with Alberto Viani ’s (1906-1989) large 1963 marble Il pastore dell’essere (The Shepherd of Being ), currently located in the courtyard of the Biblioteca delle Oblate in Florence. The two artists, in addition to having been admirers and friends of the great Alsatian master, were significantly influenced by him, as revealed by their organically based artistic research.

The presence in the exhibition of Minassian, a true trait d ’union between the great sculptor and Italy from the 1940s to the 1960s, finds further justification within the very history of the donation of the work Larme de galaxie. Thanks to the documentary reconstruction of the whole affair, it was in fact possible to understand that it was Minassian himself, supported by Viani, who convinced the wife of the recently deceased artist to donate one of her husband’s works to the city of Florence for the then-established Museo Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea (MIAC). The exhibition thus makes it possible, not only to admire a work of Florentine heritage whose traces had been lost, but also to write a new page of history, hinging on the links and affinities between various protagonists of 20th-century Italian and international art. The work, which belongs to a late phase of the artist’s activity, fully represents Arp’s poetics and style in sculpture, which began in the early 1930s, after the conclusion of the Dada and Surrealist phases, with the search for an abstract plastic, organic matrix, that is, understood not as an imitation of the forms of nature, but as nature itself: that is, a material, in which there remained strong assonances to the forms of animal and plant organisms, constituted, however, of the same germinating, spontaneous and immediate force of nature, which was always Arp’s main source of inspiration.

The rounded forms, made sinuous by a delicate interplay of variations between bulges and depressions on the very smooth surface, as well as by a harmonious undulating profile, seem to indicate Larme de galaxie as one of those fresh takes conducted by Arp in the late phase - to which Fruit d’une pierre of 1959, Gueule de fleur and Feuille sur cristal, both of 1960, among other works, can be ascribed for comparison - of the organic experiments carried out in the 1930s, and precisely of the time when a predominantly ovoid and curvilinear plastic scheme is present, as in some works of the Human Concretions or Fruits series. The irrepressible greatness of Arp’s creative imagination is an aspect that was also noted by Giuseppe Marchiori, among the first Italian critics to deal with the artist’s work, who wrote thus in 1964: “There is such a morphological richness, ranging in the limitless field of nature with a continuous change of perspectives and themes, in an ever-renewed alternative, from the memory of childhood fairy tales to memories of a classicity removed from history, from escapes into the absolute of pure forms to observations of gestures and aspects of animals and plants, from celestial contemplations to the most human disturbances of love and flesh, from surreal germinations and growths to the discovery, in objects or monuments, of an original, prehistoric, fascinating and mysterious world.”

The statements

"Through a long and meticulous study of documents scattered between Italy, Germany, France and Switzerland, it has been possible to identify an important sculpture by Jean Hans Arp, entitled Larme de galaxie (1962), within the Florentine civic collections," says Emanuele Greco, curator of the exhibition. “The discovery of the work, which was specially chosen and donated by the artist’s wife in the aftermath of the Florence flood, allows us to shed new light on the history of the far-sighted project of the Museo Internazionale d’Arte Moderna (MIAC), initiated by historian and art critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti with an appeal to artists, and conceived as a sort of grandiose reparation to the city after the damage caused by the catastrophe of November 4, 1966, and which in fact constitutes the founding nucleus of the current Museo Novecento.”

“A beautiful rediscovery operation that demonstrates once again how Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s appeal after the flood was really listened to by our city and then became a reality with the birth of a ’home’ of the contemporary such as the Museo Novecento,” highlights Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Culture Alessia Bettini. “Thanks to this exhibition, it will be possible to admire an exceptional masterpiece that is part of the historical-artistic heritage born from that very call and to delve into the work of a multifaceted and profound artist such as Jean Arp, also putting it in relation with works by homegrown talents that are already exhibited in the museum and in other places. Important also, in this case, was the teamwork with academia; it is proof once again that by networking among different realities, high-level goals can be achieved.”

“It is good practice of the museum to dialogue with the academic and university world in order to attract the best minds in the orbit of the museum itself and to enhance the outcomes of scientific research with curatorial and exhibition projects that are also significant for the general public,” says Sergio Risaliti, Director of the Novecento Museum. “In this case, the synergy established between the museum and the academic world produced the discovery of a work by Jean Arp thanks to the contribution of Emanuele Greco, a researcher and scholar, who rediscovered a very important work by the Alsatian master preserved in the deposits of the civic collections. Larme de galaxie, of which no trace had been lost since the 1970s, had been donated to the city of Florence in response to the appeal of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, who, in the aftermath of the 1966 flood, had called together major international artists to make a gift of a work with the prospect of founding the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of the city of Florence. Only after decades, the Museo Novecento was opened in 2014, filling a great gap. Today, we are even more satisfied in remembering the events of that time, also because to our commitment on the enhancement of the collections is added the support of scientific research.”

The exhibition Alberto Magnelli. Armocromes

As part of the project to enhance the works and artists in the Florentine civic collections, the Museo Novecento, from November 11, 2022 to February 15, 2023 also presents the exhibition Alberto Magnelli. Armocromie curated by Eva Francioli. The monographic exhibition, dedicated to the master of international abstractionism, is part of the exhibition cycle that, on a regular basis, intends to outline short portraits of great artists of the 20th century, with the intention of delving into specific aspects of their practice and less investigated episodes of their lives.

Tuscan by birth and French by adoption, Alberto Magnelli (Florence 1888 - Meudon 1971) made a decisive contribution to the spread of new visual codes in post-World War II Europe. The creator of a long and incessant research on the medium of painting, at the turn of the 1910s and the 1960s he developed an entirely original repertoire of forms and colors. The oft-mentioned self-taught training will be followed, in the years of his early youth, by a confrontation with the most innovative experiences of international art, cultivated also through friendships with the main protagonists of the Parisian artistic and cultural scene. A special place will be, in this sense, held by Jean Arp and his wife Sophie, with whom Magnelli will share important art and life experiences during the years of World War II.

The exhibition allows the rediscovery of Magnelli’s complex creative parabola, starting with the display of the entire bequest destined by the artist himself, on his deathbed, to his hometown, Florence. Exhibited for the first time in 1973 at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Palazzo Pitti, the Alberto Magnelli Legato consists of fifteen works, including paintings, drawings and collages, created between 1914 and 1968. The nucleus exemplifies the great variety of styles and techniques experimented by the painter over the years: from his youthful experiences-in which the influence of the great Italian art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is combined with the suggestions of the French avant-garde and his passion for the primordial lines of tribal art-to his more mature compositions, in which Magnelli declines, with growing awareness, a personal language of an abstract type. The interest in the chromatic component and its infinite declinations remains constant in his production.

It is precisely the complex orchestration of color that constitutes the key to accessing the knowledge of this great master: a sophisticated and never taken for granted harmonization, capable of conveying the different artistic and existential phases crossed by Alberto Magnelli during his long and exciting career.

“The commitment to the enhancement of civic collections continues with a focus on an artist born in Florence, then living in France, among the pioneers of abstractionism,” emphasizes Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Culture Alessia Bettini. “The exhibition will be a journey through Magnelli’s artistic universe, a path through works ranging from paintings, drawings and collages that will allow visitors to delve into one of the most original and significant expressive languages of the time. At the Museo Novecento once again it becomes possible to discover or rediscover figures who have marked the contemporary art scene, thanks to a valuable repertoire that we have available in our city.”

“At the beginning of my mandate in 2018, I decided on a project to enhance the works of the civic collections based on special focuses dedicated to individual artists in the deposits,” explains Sergio Risaliti, director of the Novecento Museum in Florence. “After Mafai, Mirko, and Cagli, now it is the turn of Alberto Magnelli, whose legacy the City of Florence preserves, directly received from the artist, of no less than 15 masterpieces, with works representative of all the stages of his career: from the figurative beginnings, when the artist took inspiration from his knowledge of the work of French masters such as Matisse and others, to the Lyrical Explosions, The Stones, and later the abstract works, the absolute personal mark of Magnelli’s language. What is certain is that Magnelli is a master of color, hence the choice of the title that evokes the chromatic experiments that involved the art world from the mid-nineteenth century onward.”

A Hans Arp work that had been lost track of resurfaces in Florence. And now it is being exhibited

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