A journey through Italian art between the wars. The exhibition at the GAM in Turin

From May 5 to September 12, 2021, GAM in Turin opens the exhibition Viaggio controcorrente. Italian Art 1920-1945, an exhibition dedicated to a very intense historical period for Italian art, between the end of the Great War and the end of the Second World War: twenty-five years of history told with about 130 works drawn from the museum’s holdings and some selected works from the Galleria Sabauda (Royal Museums of Turin), rotating the two public collections around a significant selection of 73 masterpieces from the rich private collection of the lawyer Giuseppe Iannaccone of Milan.

The exhibition, curated by Annamaria Bava, head of the Heritage Area of the Musei Reali, GAM director Riccardo Passoni and Iannaccone collection curator Rischa Paterlini, was desired and conceived to highlight the curative role of Art, as a healing vehicle that through beauty urges the health of the body as well as the soul. The event supports a fundraiser in favor of the Piedmont Foundation for Cancer Research Onlus on the occasion of its 35th anniversary. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Fondazione CRT and Intesa Sanpaolo.

Thus, from the dialogue between the three collections, two public and one private, was born this exhibition that aimed to investigate, through works of great artistic quality, the history, ideas, projects and clashes that characterized the years between the two wars. These twenty-five years of our history saw the birth, after the turbulent years of the Avant-Garde, of the principles of Valori Plastici, which, inspired by the solemnity of the great Italian past, certainly formed the basis of the rhetoric of a “fascist” art, which later developed into the appeal to classicism: an art that favored clear and sober settings, with reference to the purity of form and harmony in composition. Giuseppe Iannaccone’s collection of Italian art between the two wars today represents a unicum in the Italian and international panorama, and was born in the early 1990s with the manifest desire to reconstruct an alternative to this rhetorical and official dimension, managing to trace the works of a significant group of artists who believed in an art with many expressive possibilities, in a time span from 1920 to 1945.

The collection thus brings together the works of artists whose researches developed individual and collective visions against the Fascist cultural policies of return to order and monumental Novecento classicism. From the poetry of the everyday of Ottone Rosai and Filippo De Pisis to the expressionism of the Scuola di via Cavour (Mario Mafai, Scipione, Antonietta Raphaël), from the excavation work in the real of Fausto Pirandello, Renato Guttuso and Alberto Ziveri, to the currents of the Turin Six (Jessie Boswell, Gigi Chessa, Nicola Galante, Carlo Levi, Francesco Menzio, Enrico Paulucci) and Lombard Chiarismo (Angelo Del Bon, Francesco De Rocchi, Umberto Lilloni), to the innovative forces of the Corrente painters and sculptors (Ernesto Treccani, Renato Birolli, Lucio Fontana, Aligi Sassu, Arnaldo Badodi, Luigi Broggini, Giuseppe Migneco, Italo Valenti, Bruno Cassinari, Ennio Morlotti, and Emilio Vedova), the collection represents an original and important testimony to a complex and vital creative season in twentieth-century Italian art.

The exhibition includes a cross-comparison with about sixty works from the collections of GAM and the Musei Reali: a juxtaposition that was possible because most of the artists in the Iannaccone collection are present in GAM’s collections thanks to the increase in its holdings, which took place precisely in the specific years of the project, then continued to the present with the recent acquisition of Francesco Menzio’s Red Nude by the De Fornaris Foundation. Few know that the Galleria Sabauda, in addition to masterpieces from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, possesses a substantial early twentieth-century collection, which was brought into its collections following the reunification of works acquired from 1935 to 1942 by the Soprintendenza all’Arte Medievale e Moderna per il Piemonte e la Liguria, investing significant financial resources to represent the achievements of contemporary Piedmontese artists. It was also a particular challenge to present, alongside twentieth-century works, a number of targeted works of ancient art from the Galleria Sabauda, which scale between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly effective in evoking distant memories, suggestions and comparisons, thematic or stylistic, that consciously or unconsciously seem to have influenced and stimulated our early twentieth-century artists.

The exhibition is divided into thematic sections: “Interiors”; “Figures”; “Allegories and Portraits”; “Still Lifes”; and “Landscapes/Views,” and is accompanied by a catalog published by Silvana Editoriale, edited by Annamaria Bava, Riccardo Passoni and Rischa Paterlini, which includes all reproductions of the works on display and in-depth texts. For all information you can visit the website of the GAM in Turin.

Statements

“This exhibition,” says Rischa Paterlini, “was born with a great civil and social input, that of supporting the Fondazione Piemontese per la Ricerca sul Cancro. The project saw the light of day thanks to the synergy between the Ministry of Culture, Turin’s public institutions, an enlightened Milanese collector and a private foundation, which together made it possible not only to undertake a dialogue between public and private collections to hypothesize an exhibition that embraces one of the most important cross-sections of the last century, but also the beneficial and gratifying opportunity to concretely support an institute that has always been close to research and the care of others.”

“We started with a proposal to present only the Iannaccone collection in GAM, which then changed to the project of setting up the lawyer’s collection by interfacing it-since the names of artists, the works, the era, were perfectly compatible-with the works in our collection,” says Riccard Passoni. “And it turned out to be a discourse of clear interest that deserved to be explored further. Finally came also the suggestion to involve the Sabauda Gallery within the design of this exhibition project, initially only for the part of the twentieth century but also, in general, to the works of the Sabauda from that period. This indication then expanded, working with Annamaria Bava, head of the heritage area of the Royal Museums, to the choice of including works of ancient art according to a path that we will later develop in our conversation. The result was a project that we did not expect, in a dialogue between public and private collections, not only of Italian art between the two wars, but also of works of ancient art. The way of collecting within a public institution rather than a private institution or collection is very different. The Avvocato is a particular collector, a ”Della Ragione of other times,“ as Elena Pontiggia called him. Never interested in the fashions of the moment, when he began collecting, he did so by studying and collecting art history books and became passionate about a specific historical period; from there, to collect he let himself be led by two rules to which he never disobeyed: great quality of the works and consistency with the interwar years from 1920 to 1945, always following only what his passion dictated.”

“The Royal Museums also immediately joined with enthusiasm the project, which was born from the union of public and private institutions with charitable purposes, to support together research and prevention through culture,” Annamaria Bava stressed. “For the Sabauda Gallery, which is an integral part of the Royal Museums, participation in an exhibition focused on the interwar years could also be an opportunity to make one of its lesser-known collections better known to the public, namely that of the early twentieth century, integrated in this context with two collections of great importance such as those of the GAM and the Iannaccone collection. Few people are in fact aware of the fact that the Sabauda, in addition to masterpieces from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century, possesses a conspicuous number of modern works that include not only paintings but also sculptures and engravings. As a result of the meetings that took place to define the project, a different stimulus also arose, which then developed as a new challenge: that of presenting, alongside the twentieth-century works, some paintings or sculptures of ancient art that are particularly significant for juxtapositions and comparisons with the works that are the protagonists of the exhibition.”

Image: Carlo Levi, Woman and Fruit (1933; oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea / Guido and Ettore De Fornaris Foundation)

A journey through Italian art between the wars. The exhibition at the GAM in Turin

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