At the Museo Novecento in Florence, an exhibition recounts the utopian community of Monte Verità

It opened at the Museo Novecento in Florence on November 19, 2021, and will remain open to the public until April 10, 2022, the exhibition Monte Verità. Back to nature, curated by Sergio Risaliti, Chiara Gatti and Nicoletta Mongini and organized by MUS.E. The exhibition, in collaboration with the Monte Verità Foundation (Ascona, Canton Ticino), is dedicated to the famous hill of utopia, its founders and the illustrious men who saw in its spaces a buen retiro far from the drama of wars and also from the ideological clash between capitalism and consumerism. Monte Verità became a laboratory of a new culture, a counter-culture born in response to bourgeois conformity and dominant thought: the cradle of an existence based on primitive rhythms, it attracted thinkers and anarchists, philosophers, theosophists, men of letters, artists and architects from every country. These adhered to the model of communal living promoted by the German Lebensreform movement.

The project traces the 100-year experience of Monte Verità that intertwines the lives of twentieth-century intellectuals and masters: from the anarchist Bakunin to the Hungarian choreographer Rudolf von Laban, from the anarcho-communist theorist Pyotr Kropotkin to the Dadaist Hugo Ball, from the dancer Isadora Duncan to the great writer Hermann Hesse; and again, from Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius to artists Hans Arp and Paul Klee, from Carl Gustav Jung to curator Harald Szeemann who, fascinated by the history of the place, dedicated to it in 1978 a traveling exhibition in Europe entitled Monte Verità. The Breasts of Truth.

“In the mid-19th century, with the global success of positivism and the industrial revolution, the mythical and fabulous relationship with the outdoors jumps. Nature is no longer inviolable, and Mother Earth is transformed into spiritless matter, into an inanimate thing, all at the disposal of progress and increasingly rampant capitalism,” writes Sergio Risaliti. “Reason dominates the world and will result in its extremisms in an annihilation of freedom and differences, generating disastrous conflicts for the supremacy of one over the other. Here then, from the middle of the nineteenth century, many artists sought a new primal contact with the outdoors, seeking in wilderness or adamic civilizations what was being lost on this side of the civilized world. This gave rise to utopian communities like that of Monte Verità in the hills of Ascona, a place that became mythical within a few decades and whose aura still radiates today. Prominent personalities of the artistic culture of the early decades of the 20th century, such as Laban and Isadora Duncan, Arp and Klee, along with literati and philosophers like Hesse and Jung, found spiritual and creative refuge here. Vanguards fleeing the horror of two fratricidal wars and then an increasingly evident destruction of the harmony between man and nature. This explains the reasons for an exhibition dedicated to this community that interweaves romantic sentiments and anarchy, philosophy of nature and sacred science. Today, when terms like ’vegetarianism,’ ’pacifism,’ and ’sustainability’ are categorical imperatives in the evolution of our civilization, Monte Verità once again becomes a reference for those who are not content with political inertia and the increasingly disastrous cynicism of the global economy. The Museo Novecento with this exhibition reaffirms its function as a cultural, social and political laboratory, in the wake of a humanistic tradition that sees art as responsible for change.”

“Bringing Monte Verità to Florence, the cradle of art and culture, is confirmation that this place continues to be able to tell its story because of the modernity that has distinguished it since its inception,” comments Nicoletta Mongini, Culture Manager of the Monte Verità Foundation. “It has been a crossroads of ideas, revolutionary visions and exceptional thinkers, first and foremost Harald Szeemann, to whom this project pays tribute.”

Daily practices include vegan eating, heliotherapy and nudism, gymnastics, dance and meditation.

“In the long literature of escape, which has seen many authors at the dawn of modernity set sail to distant and virgin geographies, Monte Verità has represented for many a refuge, but also a source of inspiration,” comments Chiara Gatti, art historian and critic. “The Edenic dream of a pastoral world is rooted in the myth of the ’good savage’ and mixed with the anarchic ideas spread by the painting of Paul Signac or Camille Pissarro. Artists on the Mount, from Segal to Arp, fed on the same utopia, ferrying it to new forms, which led them from naturalism to the abstract.”

The exhibition is divided into three stages: the philosophical origins of the Mount, the development of its architecture, and the art of dance. It all begins with the original leather and cardboard suitcase of the founders who came from the north and the “vegetarian chair” made of woven branches and used by the anarchist Karl Gräser. Examples of bio-climatic design, ahead of current green architectural experiences, can be found in the images and models of the “air-light huts,” constructions designed to house the patients of the former sanatorium in simple but pure environments open to the benefits of the sun. Veggy menus, publicity brochures, and vintage photos of domestic occupations go hand in hand with maps showing the growth of the colony and then the transfer of ownership. After the founders emigrated to Spain and then to Brazil in 1920, the hill was in fact purchased by Baron Eduard von der Heydt, who commissioned the construction of the Bauhaus-style hotel and welcomed the very masters of the famous Weimar design school. The itinerary features furniture used by the architect Fahrenkamp for the hotel rooms, including the Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breuer, who also lived on the Monte, as well as works by Hans Arp who, together with Marianne von Werefkin, Alexej von Jawlensky and Hans Richter, was among the first artists to breathe the atmosphere. The story of Monte Verità is also told through other images, as well as projections made available by the RSI Archives, sounds and stage clothes. In dance he found one of the most practiced artistic expressions thanks to the school that Laban created on site, joined by students such as Mary Wigman, the Duncan or the Gothic-Egyptian dancer Charlotte Bara who built her theater on the slopes of the Mount, entrusting its construction to another architect with Bauhaus manners Carl Weidemeyer. Two of Charlotte’s precious dresses related to her sacred dances dialogue in the exhibition with original shots and films of Laban’s classes.

Film screenings, lectures and book presentations are scheduled throughout the exhibition.

For info: www.museonovecento.it

Hours: Daily 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed Thursdays.

Image: Group portrait with dancers (Monte Verità Foundation, Harald Szeemann Fund, Suzanne Perrottet Fund)

At the Museo Novecento in Florence, an exhibition recounts the utopian community of Monte VeritÃ

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