From Matisse to Modigliani, in Padua here are drawings from the Musée de Grenoble

Palazzo Zabarella in Padua announces the exhibition visitable from October 5, 2024 to January 12, 2025 titled MATISSE PICASSO MODIGLIANI MIRÓ - Masterpieces of Drawing from the Musée de Grenoble, curated by Guy Tosatto and in collaboration with the Musée de Grenoble, an exhibition space located in the city in southern France. For the Italian exhibition, the French museum has made available a significant selection of its rich collection of drawings, revealing a hitherto unexplored part of the collection. The selection proposed at Palazzo Zabarella brings together 47 artists and more than 130 works, offering the opportunity to discover the different techniques and languages that characterized the contemporary art scene in Paris, which was the great workshop of modernity. The exhibition is divided into five sections spanning a time span from 1900 to 1960. The main artistic movements that marked the first half of the 20th century are investigated: from Neo-Impressionism to Fauve-styleExpressionism, from Cubism to a return to order, from Dadaist rebellion to Surrealist dreaming toabstraction. Emerging through a series of masterpieces are the personalities of Matisse, Picasso, Chagall, Miró, Signac, Bonnard, Vuillard, Modigliani, Rouault, Delaunay, Arp, Balthus, Calder, and Tobey. Contaminations between poetry, literature and visual arts are also explored, as in the case of experimental drawings by Artaud, Klossowski, Cocteau and Michaux.

“With this fascinating exhibition, on which we are betting a lot and which will surprise our audience,” says Federico Bano, President of the Bano Foundation, “we wanted to propose a different, very original approach to understanding the experimentations of the movements and protagonists that profoundly renewed the vision and representation of reality in the first half of the 20th century.”

“On display are the great protagonists of the post-Impressionist avant-gardes that developed before and after the war, moving from the daring experiments of Cubism to the provocations of Dadaism, the dreamlike projections of Surrealism, and abstraction, but always keeping in mind the longevity and validity of figuration that overbearingly re-emerged between the 1920s and 1930s, on the heels of the instances of the so-called return to order,” adds Fernando Mazzocca, scientific director of Palazzo Zabarella.

The five sections of the exhibition

If already in the second half of the 19th century the French Impressionists had scandalized the public and critics with their new painting based on the sensation and rendering of light. From the Neo-Impressionist drawings of Paul Signac, we thus move on to the sheets with more evocative strokes by Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, and then to the more provocative and already expressionist sign of Georges Rouault. Henri Matisse’s graphic inventions are diverse: from studies of female nudes made at the turn of the century to a charcoal with the theme of The Dance, to some experiments from the 1940s such as the series of plates entitled Jazz in which the famous figure of Icarus appears and the decoupage technique .

The decomposition of form linked to the multiplication of viewpoints inaugurated by Pablo Picasso in 1907 represented a revolution in the art world contemporary with him. The Catalan artist shows a different way of representing reality: his drawings from the Cubist period are flanked by those showing a return to figuration and a classical dimension as in the magnificent Portrait of Olga of 1921. The works of Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and Ossip Zadkine propose new possibilities for breaking down and recomposing the image in sheets that are often even more colorful, vivid, and characterized by a purely lyrical dynamism.

When in 1916 in Zurich a group of writers, intellectuals, and artists of different backgrounds and training founded the Cabaret Voltaire inaugurating theDadaist avant-garde, chance and total freedom of expression were the only “rules” the artist imposed on himself. The couple Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp will also maintain in the following years a creativity characterized by predominantly abstract free forms, where Francis Picabia or Marius de Zayasinvent mechanomorphic figures to mock the modern machine society. A few years later, from the premises of Dada would be born Surrealism, the movement to which painters Joan Miró and André Masson or writer Jean Cocteau linked themselves by giving form and expression to their inner visions and the world of the unconscious.

Even before the outbreak of World War I, a group of artists who had moved to Paris from other European countries, such as Amedeo Modigliani, Léonard Foujita, and Jules Pascin, kept themselves alienated from the avant-garde movements without remaining indifferent to the influence of African art or the lesson of Cézanne. In the 1920s somewhat throughout Europe and also in the French capital there was a general rethinking of the avant-garde with the recovery of the figure and composition: André Derain and Raoul Dufy moved away from the experiences of the Fauve period to rediscover a different relationship with the human figure and space; Aristide Maillol, on the other hand, remained faithful to a plastic ideal linked to the construction of a pure and timeless form.

The new language of abstraction pioneered initially by Kandinsky and Mondrian is taken up and reinterpreted in various ways throughout the twentieth century. They favored a geometric grammar Jean Gorin, linked to the theories of Neoplasticism applied in both painting and architectural design, and Auguste Herbin, among the founders of the Abstraction-Création movement, who was as attentive to the juxtaposition of colors and forms as to compositional rhythm. Sculptor Etienne Béöthy chose the fluidity of lines and forms alluding to the human body; while Alexander Calder came to poetically evoke the energy of the universe. In the post-World War II period, Mark Tobey, Bram Van Velde, and Henri Michaux reconnect with a free and spontaneous abstraction, united by a calligraphic dimension that in Tobey is inspired by Eastern philosophies and arts, in Van Velde by the search for a balance of gesture, and in Michaux by his activity as a poet and writer.

The Musée de Grenoble

Created in 1798, the Musée de Grenoble has continued to enrich its collections of ancient, modern and contemporary art until today it has a total holdings of more than 900 works including paintings, sculptures and objects, and more than 5,000 drawings from different periods. By the early 20th century, thanks to the richness and quality of its collection of ancient art, it was already considered one of the great museums of France. With the arrival of Pierre-André Farcy as director from 1919 to 1949, it would become France’s first modern art museum. A critic, painter, and advertising graphic designer, Andry-Farcy incorporated the great artists of his time, from Matisse to Picasso, Bonnard to Léger, into the collections through targeted purchases and major donations. In 1923, in particular, with the Agutte-Sembat bequest entered a unique and considerable set of Neo-Impressionist (Signac, Cross, Van Rysselberghe) and Fauves (Matisse, Derain, Marquet, Vlaminck) works. The privileged space given to drawing since its founding meant that the Grenoble museum’s graphic art cabinet became the most important in France for modern and contemporary art after that of the National Museum of Modern Art - Centre Pompidou, thanks to the works of great protagonists of the 20th century avant-garde.

From Matisse to Modigliani, in Padua here are drawings from the Musée de Grenoble

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