Corrado Cagli, Copernican artist. The exhibition at the Museo Novecento in Florence

From June 17 to October 20, 2022, the Museo Novecento in Florence is hosting the exhibition Corrado Cagli. Copernican Artist, curated by Eva Francioli, Francesca Neri and Stefania Rispoli. With this new exhibition project, the Museo Novecento intends to continue its activity of enhancing the artists present within the Florentine civic collections: this is a scientific project launched in 2018 with the exhibition dedicated to Emilio Vedova and continued with monographs dedicated, among others, to Mirko Basaldella, Mario Mafai, and Arturo Martini, a conspicuous number of whose works are present within the permanent collection.

The exhibition explores the bold and continuous artistic-theoretical experimentation of Corrado Cagli (Ancona, 1910 - Rome, 1976), one of the most interesting artists of the Italian twentieth century, at the turn of the century. A painter and draftsman but also a set designer, sculptor and tapestry maker, Cagli is present in the Museo Novecento collection with a series of paintings, some sculptures and numerous graphics, donated to the city of Florence by the artist and his heirs a few years after the flood of 1966, in response to the appeal launched by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti to support the creation of an International Museum of Contemporary Art that would compensate the city for the wound inflicted by that tragic event.

The exhibition itinerary presents a selection of works that retrace in a chronological sense some important junctures in Corrado Cagli’s creative parabola, starting with the selection of works from the 1930s when, in parallel with his mural painting trials, Cagli reworked the lesson of the Roman School and experimented with the traditional techniques of mosaic and encaustic. This was followed by the works of his maturity, following his exile in France and then in the United States, where at only twenty-eight he was forced to move because of his Jewish origins and the tightening policies of the Fascist Regime. These works are affected by his interest in international research and highlight how still in the 1950s and 1960s the artist did not give up pursuing a personal research on technique as well as style, between abstraction and figuration. This is followed by paintings on paper, cartoons for tapestries and the graphic production to which the artist devoted himself especially at the end of his activity.

Cagli interpreted art as a continuous quest, as revealed by his multifaceted activity, difficult to categorize and often the subject of criticism and misunderstanding, especially in the years after World War II, deeply marked by ideological battles. The title of the exhibition is intended to highlight precisely the artist’s extreme versatility, recalling a definition coined by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti on the occasion of the major anthological exhibition held in Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi in 1972. In fact, the critic called Cagli a “Copernican artist,” wanting to emphasize the visionary and revolutionary impetus that animated his artistic and theoretical production.

“The capacity of a museum like ours also lies in the dynamic proposal of unpublished projects that range from the artists of our time to the authors present within the civic collections, thus continuing a path of scientific valorization of the 20th century,” declares Sergio Risaliti, Director of the Museo Novecento. “Since 2018, this has been a fundamental point of the artistic direction, which with the exhibitions of Emilio Vedova, Mario Mafai, Arturo Martini and Mirko Basaldella-which were born precisely from the ’withdrawal’ of the works of these twentieth-century masters from the deposits-has been able to give life to a wide-ranging programming. Today we inaugurate the Corrado Cagli exhibition, with over thirty works including paintings, graphics and sculptures that are part of a bequest from the artist’s heirs that arrived in the aftermath of the 1966 flood. These are joined by two works in the Alberto Della Ragione Collection, as well as a painting donated by the artist himself. The exhibition is curated by Eva Francioli, Francesca Neri, and Stefania Rispoli, who have dedicated the past few months to delving into this heritage of works, adding another important piece to the Museo Novecento’s scientific program.”

Cagli was trained in Rome where, having moved with his family in 1915, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts. From a young age he cultivated a keen interest in fresco mural decoration, creating several cycles with work-related themes. From 1929 he also undertook the activity of ceramist in the Reggiani factory in Umbertide, approaching Deco linearism and the futurist solutions of Gerardo Dottori. Returning to painting, in 1932 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria di Roma, where in the same year he exhibited with Giuseppe Capogrossi and Emanuele Cavalli, with whom he would establish a strong bond, creating the Gruppo dei nuovi pittori romani and reworking the lesson of the Roman School of Via Cavour. For the environments of the Milan Triennale of 1933 he executed the large mural painting Preludi della guerra (Preludes of War), supporting his adherence to large-scale painting in the article-manifesto Muri ai pittori (Walls to Painters), in which the social function of monumental art is juxtaposed with the value of the primordial, in opposition to the classifying Novecentista formalism. On this register, he produced large wall panels for the II Quadriennale in Rome (1935) and, again for the Milan Triennale in 1936, the Battle of Solferino and San Martino, with references to 15th-century Italian painting; the following year he was in Paris to decorate the vestibule of the International Exhibition with monumental landscapes of Rome and famous figures from Italian history and culture. Alongside his large production, he also did easel painting with intimist themes and figures immersed in landscapes such as The Neophytes, participating in the most relevant Italian exhibitions. As a result of racial persecution, he found refuge in 1938 in Paris and soon after in New York, where he continued his pictorial activity and, having become an American citizen, he enlisted as a volunteer in the army, taking part in military activities in Europe, from which the War Drawings were to be born. Returning to America, where he remained until moving to Rome in 1948, he became interested in the various post-cubist and expressionist experiences, setting his work on a double register, abstract and figurative, in a search for new languages that would lead him to experiment continuously. Along with his activity as a decorator, from the 1950s he devoted himself to set design and assemblage sculpture, and then in the 1960s he created cycles marked by suggestions of the informal or material like the Carte. Of 1970-73 is the monumental work made in Germany in Göttingen to commemorate the synagogue destroyed by the Nazis, which is accompanied, in the last years of his activity, by a return to figuration, especially in graphics.

For all information about the exhibition you can visit the Museo Novecento website.

Corrado Cagli, Copernican artist. The exhibition at the Museo Novecento in Florence

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