From Modigliani to Schiele, an exhibition of drawings by the greats of the 20th century at the Museo Novecento in Florence

Rendezvous with a new exhibition dedicated to drawing in the rooms on the second floor of the Novecento Museum in Florence. It is entitled Nel Novecento. From Modigliani to Schiele from De Chirico to Licini and is on view from July 12 to October 17, 2019. The exhibition curated by Saretto Cincinelli and Stefano Marson and made possible thanks to Leofrance, features a group of 42 drawings by 20th-century Italian and foreign artists, all owned by the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.

The drawings come from the museum’s collection of graphic works, which consists of about 13,000 sheets including drawings, prints and engravings by artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Florentine selection aimed to put the two museums in dialogue, starting with the presence in the Museo Novecento in Florence of Alberto Della Ragione ’s collection and tracing in the National Gallery’s graphic collections the drawings of the same artists collected by the engineer, such as Giorgio De Chirico, Filippo De Pisis, Renato Guttuso, Osvaldo Licini, Mario Mafai, Giorgio Morandi, Enrico Prampolini and Mario Sironi.

Thus, four drawings by Telemaco Signorini (including The Painter’s Studio), chosen from within a large nucleus owned by the National Gallery, are meant to recall the engineer’s early passion for Macchiaioli painters, with the purchase of works by Signorini himself, Giovanni Fattori and Silvestro Lega, later resold. Or, three precious drawings by Amedeo Modigliani chosen to evoke the famous 1919 self-portrait now in São Paulo, Brazil, owned by the collector for many years and then also sold, or finally, a beautiful drawing by Oskar Kokoschka, which reminds us how Alberto Della Ragione was also initially interested in works by this artist and German Expressionism.

From Kokoschka’s drawing, the selection has expanded to include a rare and valuable core of drawings by Expressionist artists, such as Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Ludwig Kirchner. Of the latter two artists there are a number of drawings that, along with Kokoschka’s, were requisitioned by the Nazis from important German museums for display at the famous Munich Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937, then repurchased and rescued by the painter Emanuel Fohn and finally donated by his wife in 1967 to the National Gallery, at the request of Palma Bucarelli then director of the museum. It should be noted that Sofie Fohn and Palma Bucarelli met two years earlier precisely in Florence, on the occasion of the historic exhibition on Expressionism held at Palazzo Strozzi for the XXVII Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, dedicated that year by Roman Vlad to expressionist music and theater.

The exhibition is also an opportunity to remember that Alberto Della Ragione donated works not only to Florence but also to the National Gallery in Rome, or to recall that some of those in his collections had a passage in the engineer’s collection, such as Scipione’s Portrait of Ungaretti or Renato Guttuso’s famous Crucifixion, purchased by Alberto Della Ragione on the occasion of the IV Bergamo Prize, later returned to the artist and later donated by him to the National Gallery. Finally, the presence of a drawing by Gustav Klimt is linked to the decisive acquaintance with the Viennese artist’s works made by Arturo Martini and Felice Casorati, two of Alberto Della Ragione’s most beloved artists, who had the opportunity to draw inspiration from the master’s work at the 1910 Venice Biennale.

For all information you can visit the museum’s official website.

Source: press release

From Modigliani to Schiele, an exhibition of drawings by the greats of the 20th century at the Museo Novecento in Florence

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