The great protagonists of the 20th century at Palazzo Franchetti, Venice

Palazzo Franchetti in Venice is hosting the exhibition The Twentieth Century at Palazzo Franchetti until February 16, 2020. An exhibition itinerary among the masters of the 20th century: from Giorgio De Chirico to Giorgio Morandi, from Giacomo Balla to René Magritte, from Paul Klee to Franz Kline, from Joan Mirò to Leoncillo. The exhibition is intended to be an opportunity to question the future of art through works by the great protagonists of the 20th century. Those on display are rarely seen works. Also heard will be Giorgio Morandi’s words in an interview with The Voice of America in 1957: “the possible educational task of the figurative arts” is “particularly in the present time, that of communicating the images and feelings that the visible world arouses in us.”

We then reflect on speed, movement and technology with the works of Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini: “Futurist painting in destroying the immobility in everything” is “transported into the awesome chaos of universal dynamic action.”"

The colors of the canvases resonate in Joan Miró’s “immediate irruption of the infinite into the finite,” contrasting with the calm art of Paul Klee, especially in Die Rolle of 1930, a painting made during one of his last years of teaching at the Bauhaus.

One wonders what the purpose of future painting will be. Giorgio de Chirico, like a seer, states that “it will be exactly the same as that of poetry, music and philosophy: to create sensations unknown in the past; to strip art of the common and the accepted, of any subject in favor of an aesthetic synthesis: to completely suppress man as a guide or as a means of expressing symbols, sensations, thoughts; to free painting once and for all from the anthropomorphism that suffocates sculpture; to see everything, even man, in his quality of everything.”

It continues with Surrealism: the iconic masterpieces of René Magritte bring out how “the mystery it is about” is “unanswerable by definition.”Abstract Expressionism, Franz Kline, theInformal; Leoncillo stated that “volumes and drawing are not to be sought. I don’t want to create here a void and there a fullness, but here I have the need to sink my fingers in and take out clay and there stick it on. So here comes a void and there a full, but they come, I don’t look for them as such.”

The exhibition concludes with the great revolution of the 1960s, Pop Art, and Andy Warhol declaring “all paintings should be the same size and the same colors, so that they are interchangeable, and no one thinks he has a better or worse painting. And if one is a masterpiece, they all are. And then even if the subject is different you always paint the same picture.”

Roberto Sebastian Matta’s totem poles are placed in the garden overlooking the Grand Canal.

For info: www.acppalazzofranchetti.com

Hours: Daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Tuesdays.

Tickets: Full 10 euros, reduced 8 euros.

Image ©ACP Palazzo Franchetti

The great protagonists of the 20th century at Palazzo Franchetti, Venice

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