Florence, the Museo Novecento dedicates an exhibition to the relationship between Arturo Martini and Carrara

From September 10 to November 14, 2021, the Museo Novecento in Florence is dedicating an exhibition to the relationship between Arturo Martini (Treviso, 1889 - Milan, 1947). Entitled Arturo Martini and Carrara. Woman Swimming Underwater, curated by Lucia Mannini with Eva Francioli and Stefania Rispoli, is set up in the ground-floor rooms of the museum and, as mentioned, is dedicated to that special relationship that Martini, like so many other sculptors, had with the Apuan Alps, where statuary marble, the favorite of artists for its purity and luster, has been quarried since ancient Roman times. The link between twentieth-century sculptors and the Apuan and Versilian territory is thus renewed within this new exhibition project, which ideally follows the one just concluded and intended to investigate the relationship between Henry Moore and Tuscany. It was in Versilia, in fact, that the British sculptor came into contact with that enormous tradition of craft and artistic wisdom preserved in the hands of stonemasons and quarrymen. His fascination with the landscape of the quarries of the Apuan Alps and the salubrious serenity of the coastline between Forte dei Marmi and Carrara contributed to a lasting association between Moore and the local artistic and intellectual community.

Martini’s relationship with Carrara and with marble has the character of discovery and adventure: the sculptor from Treviso landed under the Apuan Alps in mid-1937, following a contract for the large bas-relief The Corporate Justice, intended for the Palace of Justice in Milan, and returned there several times, working at the Nicoli workshop. In the years between 1939 and 1940 Martini also matured a profound dissatisfaction withmonumental statuary, which led him to temporarily abandon sculpture to devote himself to painting, as evidenced by the painting The Marble Quarries, shown in the exhibition. In 1941, however, he received a commission from the University of Padua to execute the famous monument in memory of the Latin historian Titus Livy. It is said that from a sliver of the large block of Titus Livy was born Woman Swimming Underwater, the outcome of a long intellectual gestation. It was only then, in fact, that the sculptor found the linguistic means to flesh out the impression he had, years earlier, from watching the 1928 film White Shadowsof the South Seas, set in Polynesia and starring Mexican-Thai Raquel Torres. Martini decides to complete the sculpture by decapitating it and, with a clean, merciless blow, thus transforms “the work from ’dated’ to ’eternal,’” as Carlo Nicoli would observe. The extreme research conducted by Martini in the 1940s thus finds synthesis in Woman Swimming Underwater, floating suspended, floating in space, on three metal pivots conceived by architect Carlo Scarpa for the work’s first presentation at the 1942 Venice Biennale.

The exceptional loan granted by the Cariverona Foundation is worth to represent the extreme research conducted by Martini in the 1940s, which is accompanied by the possibility of seeing the film White Shadows and the precious volume Una scultura published by gallery owner Roberto Nonveiller in 1944 to present the work, in which numerous views of it captured from different angles follow one another. Particularly significant is the cover, with a montage of two views and the transcription of a quatrain from Paul Valéry’sAir de Sémiramis (Air of Semiramis), where the Dawn invites the legendary queen of Babylon to awaken her own creative will with the force with which the swimmer emerges from the waters.

“The Museo Novecento,” says Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento, "has gained its own position of scientific prominence in recent years with a series of projects that, one after the other or at the same time, speak to each other. After Medardo Rosso, for example, the subject of a fine exhibition three years ago, we opened in June one dedicated to Arturo Martini. Two artists of fundamental importance in reconstructing the evolution of plastic language between the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, as an appendix to the Arturo Martini and Florence exhibition, we are adding a very significant chapter featuring a masterpiece by the sculptor, that Woman Swimming Underwater, considered by the author himself the flower of his research. As proof of a programming that chains themes upon themes, topics to topics, on this occasion we focus on Martini’s special relationship with Carrara. An aspect of the bond between artists and territory that recalls how even Henry Moore had elected the Apuan Alps as his workshop, where he found raw material for his creations. This editorial line distinguishes ours, which pursues a scientifically satisfying course, aiming to raise cultural awareness in the Florentine community and beyond, offering the opportunity to broaden knowledge of 20th-century art with lunges into territories and protagonists considered perhaps less spectacular but whose prominence in history is undeniable. There are gaps to fill and missing tiles to recover, and the Museum fulfills this civic function. A propaedeutic profile that is transformed into poetic epiphany with the presence of works such as the Woman Swimming Without Water, on loan from the Fondazione Cariverona, and thanks to evocative displays such as today’s that recreate theauroral moment of a fruitful inspiration, such as the one Martini had at the vision of a film, White Shadows, which we wanted to present in full, immersing visitors in that same magical atmosphere that ignited the creative intelligence of our great sculptor."

“Just as the volume published by Nonveiller proposed, with a rich sequence of images, a careful observation from several points of view of the Woman Swimming Underwater,” says Lucia Mannini, curator of the exhibition, “so here we offer the rare opportunity to observe, with due calm, this resounding response of Martini to the statuary of his time. In fact, two emblematic works have been chosen to commemorate the Carrara season: a painting, The Marble Quarries, testifying to the creative crisis experienced by Martini in the 1940s and his approach to painting, and a sculpture, Woman Swimming Underwater, which the artist himself called ’the flower of my research.’ Supporting the choice is a page of ”Stile“ in which Gio Ponti, in April 1947, shortly after the sculptor’s untimely death, published some thoughts that Martini had expressed on paper in La scultura lingua morta and reproduced the two works close together.”

The Arturo Martini and Carrara exhibition, in accordance with the scientific vision of the museum understood as a laboratory for research and education, is the result of a collaboration between the Museo Novecento and the SAGAS Department of the University of Florence. As part of the project From the Classroom to the Museum, launched in 2019 with Professor Giorgio Bacci, two young students from the master’s course in Contemporary Art History, Margherita Scheggi and Valentina Torrigiani, worked together with Lucia Mannini and the museum’s curatorial staff on the organization of the exhibition. In fact, with this project, the museum intends to bring the field of academic research closer to that of museum education and dissemination to the general public, while at the same time offering a unique opportunity for an in-depth study of the great masters of the Italian twentieth century and the enhancement of our heritage.

Florence, the Museo Novecento dedicates an exhibition to the relationship between Arturo Martini and Carrara

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