An eternal beauty: kicking off the major exhibition with early 20th century masterpieces

Opening on July 2, 2017, at the Mart in Rovereto is the major exhibition Un eterna bellezza. The Classical Canon in Early Twentieth-Century Italian Art, an exhibition conceived together with the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid and which has already met with great public and critical acclaim in Spain (where it ran from February 25 to June 4). With masterpieces from the early 20th century coming from the main collections of Europe, the Mart intends to illustrate to the public, within a context of international collaboration, the climate of the so-called"return to order" that characterized Italian art after World War I. The exhibition, curated by Beatrice Avanzi and Daniela Ferrari, will delve into the metaphysical painters, the experience of the magazine"Valori plastici," the"Novecento italiano" group, and Magical Realism: the artists who gravitated around these currents recovered artistic traditions by drawing inspiration from the great masters of the past (such as Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca) and the classical canon, in contrast to the art of the avant-garde.

“In the period of post-war reconstructions and fascisms, frustrated and disillusioned by tragic international events,” we read in the exhibition presentation, “many European artists renounced the dream of progress typical of the avant-gardes of the early 20th century. The return to reason after the madness of the conflict, the recovery of the tradition of art after experimentation, and, above all, the affirmation of the principles of beauty and harmony opposed to the deformations and dissonances of Cubist, Expressionist, and Futurist art emerge strongly. A new language was born, declining in a modern key the values of ancient and Renaissance art, reinterpreting allegorical subjects, the portrait, the figure, the landscape and still life. In this context, the importance of technical knowledge understood as a tool for the restitution and transfiguration of reality is consolidated, in search of a dreamy and timeless dimension.” The search for “pure and simple classicism, humanism, balance, dream, calm, suspension” was functional in the search for theorder that had been subverted by the events that occurred in the early twentieth century.

More than one hundred works by the greatest Italian artists of the early twentieth century are on display, from metaphysicians(Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carrà, Alberto Savinio) to Novecento Italiano painters(Achille Funi, Mario Sironi, Leonardo Dudreville, Ubaldo Oppi) through the works of artists such as Gino Severini, Cagnaccio di San Pietro, Felice Casorati, Giorgio Morandi and many others. Their works are arranged on an itinerary that is divided into seven sections: Metaphysics of Time and Space; Evocations of the Ancient; Landscapes; The Poetry of Objects; Return to the Figure. The Portrait; The Nude as Model; Seasons of Life.

“The exhibition,” says curator Daniela Ferrari, “recounts a very intense moment of Italian pictorial production in the interwar period. After the devastation of World War I, painters looked back to the past, reread and revised the lesson of the old masters, treasured this extraordinary cultural background and reconstructed a new way of painting after the seasons of the avant-garde. It is precisely this sense of reconstruction, of a return to order that this exhibition project shows. Order, harmony, balance, in other words beauty, and a sense of eternity, of permanence in things are the key words that will follow each moment, each step, work by work, to tell a precise indication of poetics common to a great many artists. It all starts with the great insight of Giorgio De Chirico, the artist who created metaphysics, who knew how to infuse his painting with mysteries, with enigma. But along with Giorgio De Chirico there are many artists who have taken up the testimony of the ancients. Even artists who had been protagonists of the historical avant-gardes such as Futurism: I am thinking for example of Carlo Carrà, Achille Funi, Massimo Campigli, Felice Casorati, and Mario Sironi, with the latter who knew how to embody the spirit of this solid, monumental, eternal painting. This exhibition has a great prevalence of the figure, because man returns to be at the center of the artists’ depiction, but there are sections entirely devoted to traditional themes, which once again become a privileged subject of the painting.”

“One of the aspects of this return to tradition that characterizes twentieth-century Italian art,” Beatrice Avanzi confirms, “is the return to the human figure. As Ugo Ojetti says, it is a new humanism, a desire to put the human figure at the center of modern art. Some rooms of the exhibition are therefore dedicated to the human figure declined in the various themes of the portrait, the nude or the family. The portrait is one of the themes that gives artists one of the most valid opportunities for comparison with Renaissance artists: all those compositional schemes that had been codified by the great Renaissance portraiture are taken up and artists take possession of them to give dignity, legitimacy to the new bourgeois class. Entering these rooms one finds, for example, portraits of the industrialists of the time that might well be found in a modern Uffizi Gallery. But it is above all the theme of the nude in all its possible forms that attracted the attention of numerous painters. The nude can be, in this era, interpreted as a return to an Edenic past, to an archaic past, as a return to a vague classicism, and in this case again to the confrontation with the old masters that guides the artists.”

The exhibition is open daily, except Monday (closing day) from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tickets: full 11 euros, reduced for groups, young people 15 to 26 and over 65, 7 euros. Free for friends of the museum, children under 14 and disabled. Family ticket: 22 euros. Guided tour rates for groups (minimum 15 and maximum 30 people, reservations required at least 15 days in advance): 80 euros in Italian, 100 euros in English or German, 50 euros for school groups, 55 euros for school groups in German or English. Reservation costs 1 euro in addition to ticket cost. Single ticket for 3 venues (Mart, Casa Depero and Galleria Civica): 14 euros full, 10 euros reduced. The exhibition will run until Nov. %, 2017. Catalog published by Electa. All information at http://www.mart.tn.it/eternabellezza.

Image: Felice Casorati, Nude, study for Meriggio (1922; Florence, Museo del Novecento)

An eternal beauty: kicking off the major exhibition with early 20th century masterpieces

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