Anna Marongiu, great Sardinian artist of the early 20th century, remembered at MAN in Nuoro with the first retrospective on her

From Friday, November 8, 2019 to Sunday, March 1, 2020, the MAN Museum in Nuoro presents the exhibition Anna Marongiu. The Shadow of the Sea on the Hill, the first museum retrospective dedicated to the work of Anna Marongiu (Cagliari, 1907 - Ostia, 1941), curated by Luigi Fassi. The exhibition represents an important stage in MAN’s research on 20th-century Sardinian and Italian art.

The exhibition develops around three cycles of illustrations dedicated to literary masterpieces created by Marongiu between 1926 and 1930: the complete series of plates of William Shakespeare ’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1930), illustrations of Alessandro Manzoni ’s I Promessi Sposi (1926) and plates of Charles Dickens ’ The Pickwick Circle (1929, pictured). The latter work, consisting of 262 plates done in ink and watercolor, forms the heart of the retrospective: on loan from the Charles Dickens Museum in London, it is now, ninety years after its creation, on view in a museum for the first time.

Anna Marongiu, who died prematurely in an aviation accident in Ostia, is one of the most original yet forgotten figures of the Sardinian art scene of the first half of the 20th century. After studying in Rome and attending the English Academy in the capital, Marongiu embarked on an artistic path that traversed multiple techniques such as drawing, pen, etching, oil, and burin with great capacity for experimentation. Her linguistic register, characterized by a strong expressiveness of sign, moved between the humorous and the dramatic, the comic and the mythological, finding originality and vigor in all the techniques she employed. The exhibition dedicated to her in 1938 by the Galleria Palladino in Cagliari was one of the first solo shows of a woman artist in Sardinia and contributed to the artist’s further affirmation on the national scene, participating in the Exhibition of Modern Italian Engraving in Rome in 1940.

The exhibition is enhanced by a short film about the artist, made by MAN and Film Commission Sardegna in collaboration with the Charles Dickens Museum and directed by Gemma Lynch.

A catalog published by Marsilio Editore will accompany the exhibition.

For all information you can visit the official website of the MAN Museum.

Anna Marongiu, great Sardinian artist of the early 20th century, remembered at MAN in Nuoro with the first retrospective on her

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