Farsetti dedicates exhibition to Italians in Paris, from De Chirico to Severini

Paris, early 20th century. Seven Italians burst onto the art scene: they are Les Italiens de Paris. The group consists of Massimo Campigli, Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, René Paresce, Alberto Savinio, Gino Severini, and Mario Tozzi. Together they constitute one of the most advanced points of pictorial and iconographic experimentation in Europe between the wars. Their experience together is brief: from 1928, with their first exhibition in the foyer of a theater, to 1933. But some of them have been in Paris since the turn of the century. Then the economic and political crisis in the mid-1930s forces them to return to the Italy of Fascism. Their last exhibition, the swan song, will be in Florence in 1942 with a text by Alberto Savinio. Les Italiens as the French call them and as they also call themselves in Italy form a heterogeneous group devoted to a new classicism and propose painting as pure imagination on the path indicated by de Chirico with metaphysics. They are “Awake Dreamers,” and their canvases are a new contemporary mythology, taking into account the anxieties and disturbances of 20th-century man.

Farsettiarte, which is celebrating 60 years of activity in Cortina this year, proposes with this exhibition a selection of works from the period when these authors made the tradition of Italian painting great in Paris, the art capital of the new fast, eccentric and technological era when for every artist or writer from Modigliani and Picasso to Arthur Miller and Ernest Hemingway living in Paris also meant being “heureux comme Dieu en France.”

In the early years of the last century from Montmartre artists moved to Montparnasse, where they dined at the Closerie des Lilas with poets-Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Fort, Max Jacob, and a young Alberto Savinio who was not afraid of sound performances at the Soirées de Paris the destination of young talent from all over the world. There are other “metechi” (as foreigners are called by Parisians): Chagall, Brancusi, Miró, Dali, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo; the Dadaists of Tristan Tzara, later the Surrealists of André Breton. And in 1919 comes the young Antoinette Raphaȅl, in the city where Joséphine Baker dominates and Edith Piaf makes her debut. In the crazy years Paris is a must for artists. Gino Severini arrives in 1906; only Modigliani is with him. Giorgio de Chirico arrives for the first time in the sultry summer of 1911, and before him in the winter of the previous year came Andrea. De Chirico would return in 1924 and see the birth of André Breton’s Surrealism. Filippo de Pisis arrives in Paris in 1925. Massimo Campigli, Mario Tozzi and René Paresce are painters who write. Campigli is a correspondent for “Il Corriere della Sera,” Tozzi arrived after the war to marry Marie Terèse, but becomes the organizer of the group. Renato Paresce, on the other hand, has been in Paris since 1912. He is a physicist, painter and journalist. He abandons science for art, but not journalism. In Paris Renato becomes René, changing political ideas and worldview.

The exhibition tells the extraordinary story of these visionary painters, not outsiders, but great Italians aware of their tradition and determined to make a name for themselves in the Paris of the mad years: from the first exhibition in 1928 in the foyer of the Louis Jouvet theater on the Champs-Elysées onwards Les Italiens will show the international public how their all-Mediterranean diversity is an asset: artists in Paris are ready to recognize them. This exhibition is an opportunity to compare themes and iconographies, highlight the commonalities among the works of Les Italiens. Emerging in these canvases are the heterogeneous richness, the eclecticism of subjects whether metaphysical or dreamlike, Mediterranean, classical, revisited by each individual author. Themes that captured the attention of Léonce Rosenberg, who wanted some of them for the walls of his house in Paris now partly preserved at the Museo delle Regole in Cortina, which is collaborating on this exhibition and, this year, celebrating 50 years of the Rimoldi Collection. In fact, a connection will be developed between the works on display in the gallery and some of those at the Museo delle Regole, a sort of ideal itinerary that will run through the two venues providing visitors with a broad but timely reconstruction of what Les Italiens de Paris represented.

The exhibition is also an opportunity to return to a reflection on Les Italiens and Italian cultural policy in the 1920s and 1930s that is still very relevant today. From Paris (without ever leaving their homeland altogether) they attract the attention of the regime, which courts them and recognizes them useful for cultural propaganda from the start. They are supported by the apparatus of trade union exhibitions organized by sculptor Antonio Maraini and Margherita Sarfatti, the first woman art critic in Europe, committed to promoting her idea of twentieth-century art. Les Italiens participated in the Novecento Italiano trade union exhibitions and were supported by Polish art critic Waldermar George, who presented them at the Venice Biennale in 1930. In 1933 Les Italiens - by now at the epilogue of the Parisian affair - will be protagonists at the Milan Triennale, which gives the walls back to the painters as in Renaissance times. It inaugurates the season of interventions wanted by the regime to fresco the walls of public places. It is the swan song for the Italians, forced to leave Paris because of the economic crisis. The traveling exhibitions continued but the epilogue had already occurred on September 22, 1933, when at the opening at the Galerie Charpentier Antonio Maraini, secretary of the National Union of Artists, officially sanctioned the new framing desired by Rome.

For all information, you can visit Farsetti’s official website.

Image: Alberto Savinio, Still Life with Shell (Fiore Marino) (1934; tempera, 59.5x49.5 cm)

Farsetti dedicates exhibition to Italians in Paris, from De Chirico to Severini

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