In 2025, Palazzo Reale in Milan will host a major retrospective exhibition dedicated to Felice Casorati

From Feb. 15 to June 29, 2025, Palazzo Reale in Milan will host the Casorati exhibition, promoted by Comune di Milano - Cultura and produced by Palazzo Reale and Marsilio Arte in collaboration with the Casorati Archive, curated by Giorgina Bertolino, Fernando Mazzocca and Francesco Poli, which is intended to be one of the largest and most comprehensive retrospectives dedicated to Felice Casorati (Novara, 1883 - Turin, 1963), an artist who returns to Milan after 36 years since his last exhibition in 1989.

Casorati has a historical bond with the city of Milan (in fact, it is one of the themes of the exhibition and the catalog published by Marsilio Arte): throughout his long career, Casorati attributed a strategic function to the Lombard capital, the first city in Italy to endow itself with a modern art system and market, recognizing its exhibitions of the 1920s as a strategic space for a direct confrontation with the most up-to-date artistic research.

More than one hundred works to retrace the different seasons of his production

The exhibition at the Palazzo Reale will retrace in chronological order the different seasons of the artist’s production, from his beginnings in the early twentieth century to the 1950s, proposing a comprehensive rereading of his art through an exhibition itinerary that will unfold in fourteen rooms. More than one hundred works will be on display for the occasion, including paintings on canvas and panel, sculptures, graphic works from the Symbolist season, and sketches for stage sets of works created for the Teatro alla Scala, from prestigious private collections and important public collections, including in particular the GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin, where the the most important and richest museum collection of Casorati’s works, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the Mart - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento and Rovereto, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Genoa, and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti in Verona. Fundamental was the close collaboration with the Casorati Archive, which provided scientific support as well as consultation and sharing of historical documentary materials. As the curators state, “the retrospective was designed to transport visitors inside Casorati’s poetic universe, inviting them to immerse themselves in his environments (the interiors and the studio, the conceptual theater of his entire poetics), cond ucending them among the pensive and melancholic figures, reflective emblems of a participatory humanity and a profound existential philosophy. The rooms of the Royal Palace provide the perfect courtly context for reconstructing the silent dimension, made up of pauses, counterpoints and voids, emanating from the works themselves.”

The narrative will follow the entire chronology of Felice Casorati’s artistic production, documenting the succession of sources of inspiration and styles, from verism to symbolism, from neoclassicism to magic realism, from the more expressionist phase oriented by Picasso’s deformations to the return to synthetism and à plat drafts, characteristic of the production of the end of his career.

The exhibition itinerary in 14 rooms

The exhibition itinerary opens with early works characterized by a marked realism, including the famous 1907 Portrait of his sister Elvira (private collection) or The Heiresses at the Mart in Rovereto in 1910. An important focus will be devoted to the years spent in Verona, where the artist moved with his family in 1911. It was here that Casorati began his Symbolist and Secessionist season, influenced by the comparison with nearby Venice, where the artist frequented Ca’ Pesaro, staged his first solo exhibition in 1913 and met Gino Rossi, Arturo Martini, and Teodoro Wolf Ferrari. The exhibition will feature some of his greatest masterpieces with the cycle of Grandi tempere and will present the evolution of his style and language after his final move to Turin, following the tragic death of his father. Here, in 1919, Felice Casorati settled in the house-studio where he would live for the rest of his life.

For the first time since 1964, three important paintings characterized by a bare, desolate spatial dimension and a metaphysical sense of disquieting loneliness will be juxtaposed in an ideal triptych: A Woman (or Waiting , 1918 - 19, private collection), A Man (or Barrel Man , 1919 - 20) and Little Girl (or Girl with Bowl , 1919), both from the collection of the GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino. These will be joined by the majestic Breakfast (Castello di Rivoli - Museum of Contemporary Art, Cerruti Collection), which depicts a family of only women, perhaps orphans or war widows, summing up Casorati’s emotional and psychological state, pervaded by a sense of mourning typical of the early postwar years.

The 1920s will be represented by the masterpieces Woman and Armor of 1921 (GAM Turin) and Silvana Cenni of 1922 (private collection), a metaphysical icon inspired by 15th-century classical measure and the altarpieces of Piero della Francesca. Casorati’s collaboration with Riccardo Gualino, a collector, patron and entrepreneur, dates from this period, for whom the artist painted family portraits and designed, together with architect Alberto Sartoris, the small private theater in their Turin residence. This association will be reconstructed in the exhibition by the three Gualino portraits, the portrait of Alfredo Casella (private collection), composer and pianist, director of many concerts in the little theater in Turin, and the dancers Raja and Bella Markman, protagonists with Cesarina Gualino of the free dance performances under Casorati’s friezes in the little theater, documented by the bas-reliefs Woman with bow, The meeting with music, Woman sitting with bowl (private collection).

In 1924 Casorati participated in the Venice Biennale: the exhibition dedicates an entire room to this important poccasion with five of the works that were exhibited there: Meriggio from 1923 (Museo Revoltella, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Trieste), Natura morta con manichini from 1924 (Museo Novecento, Milan), Ritratto di Hena Rigotti (GAM Turin), Duplice ritratto (private collection) and Concerto from 1924 (RAI, Direzione Generale, Turin and Rome). Starting in the mid-1920s, Casorati developed the theme of Conversations, an ideal cycle inaugurated by the famous Platonic Conversation of 1925 (private collection). The painting, in which next to a sensual female nude lying down, sits a man wearing a black hat (he is the architect and friend Alberto Sartoris), was the protagonist of a long exhibition tour with itsdebut at the First Exhibition of the Italian Novecento in Milan in 1926 and stops in Dresden (1926), Geneva, Zurich and Pittsburgh (1927), New York (1928) and the Barcelona Expo (1929), where it was awarded a gold medal. The exhibition will feature the 1927 Annunciation from a private collection after many years: chosen by the artist for the 1927 Italian art exhibitions at the Musée Rath in Geneva and then at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, it now returns to the public at large. Reinserted for the first time in an anthological exhibition, the work marks a very important episode in Casorati’s itinerary. Toward the end of the decade, Casorati’s art was marked by a turn toward anti-classicalism, evidenced in the exhibition by the compositions of a series of still lifes. Painting opened up to landscape, approached in the dialogue between interior and exterior in the poetic Daphne a Pavarolo of 1934 (GAM Turin). The cycle of paintings of maidens of the 1930s and 1940s was born, including Women in a Boat of 1933 (Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi, Piacenza) and The Pontorno Sisters of 1937 (Unicredit ArtC ollection), both featuring a nursing woman immersed in suspended and intimate atmospheres.

The last years of his career are documented by still lifes, in which the ancient theme of eggs (the insignia of that “Numerus, Mensura, Pondus” which is the heraldic motto of Casorati’s art) and the crest returns - with Still Life with a Helmet (1947, GAM Turin), Eggs and Lemons (1950, GAM Turin) Eggs on a Red Background (1953, private collection)-and new subjects such as Eclipse of the Moon (1949, private collection) and Parallels (1949, Autonomous Region of Valle d’Aosta Collection).

Always a music lover, Felice Casorati was not only an outstanding painter and a passionate pianist but also a set designer, working, between the 1930s and the 1950s, for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Rome Opera and La Scala in Milan. Several of his sketches, made for operas such as Le Baccanti and Fidelio, or for ballets to music by Petrassi or de Falla, come from La Scala’s own historical archives: a nucleus that, at the close of the exhibition, will also make it possible to learn about this aspect of the activity of a multifaceted artist.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive catalog published by Marsilio Arte with essays by the curators.

Image: Felice Casorati, Raja (1924-1925; tempera on panel, 120 x 100 cm; Venice, private collection) © Matteo De Fina

In 2025, Palazzo Reale in Milan will host a major retrospective exhibition dedicated to Felice Casorati

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