The Italian Toulouse-Lautrec: an exhibition on Alfredo Müller in Sesto Fiorentino.

Sesto Fiorentino celebrates the art of Alfredo Müller (Livorno, 1869 - Paris, 1939). It does so with Alfredo Müller. The Triumph of Graphic Art in the Paris of the Belle Époque, the exhibition curated by Emanuele Bardazzi and Hélène Koehl, president of the association “Les Amis d’Alfredo Müller peintre et graveur” (Strasbourg), scheduled from Sept. 11 to Nov. 27, 2022. The exhibition presents the largest collection of the artist’s graphic works so far exhibited in Italy and abroad, reading his production in the artistic context of the time and placing his works side by side with those of the greatest protagonists of the golden age of graphic art and art printing in France, a phenomenon of crucial importance that had repercussions throughout Europe and overseas.

The Leghorn painter Alfredo Müller, who emigrated with his family to Paris in 1895 following his father’s financial collapse, was a skilled Parisian engraver for about a decade , soon becoming a leader of the renewal of color etching in the Belle Époque capital. The exhibition project is structured in three venues: the Rifugio Gualdo (former church of San Giusto) on the slopes of Mount Morello, in the municipality of Sesto Fiorentino, where it will open as a preview on Sunday, Sept. 11, at 11.00 the section devoted to Parisian graphic art between the 19th and 20th centuries, with more than 100 works on paper by various authors; the Antonio Berti Exhibition Center (municipal gallery and former studio of the sculptor of the same name) in Sesto Fiorentino, which introduces the figure and work of Alfredo Müller through a selection of works on the theme of landscape largely made during his stay in Osny; La Soffitta Spazio delle Arti, at the Circolo Arci in Sesto Fiorentino, where works made by Müller during his Montmartre years will be presented, divided into six thematic sections.

The exhibition

In the former church of San Giusto, which has now become the Rifugio Gualdo, a wide-ranging exhibition of more than one hundred works on paper, in mainly period frames, is presented, recounting the world of Parisian graphic art between the 19th and 20th centuries: from affiches to illustrated magazines, from elite engravings to more popular ones, created by the best artists active in the period when the extraordinary and unrepeatable flowering of fin-de-siècle printing took place. The intent is to offer a total immersion in the world of graphic design and advertising of the period, touching on its most effervescent and joyous aspects to its most disturbing and obscure ones. In composing this kaleidoscope, a precise choice of field was not to limit itself to offering of the so-called Belle Époque only the superficial and festive side of the dances at the Moulin Rouge, or to highlight above all the more modernist aspects of the graphic revolution as has been the case in various exhibitions on the subject held abroad in recent years, but to explore also sides of it that remained more in the shadows and for this reason less known today to the collective imagination, such as a certain Symbolist and decadent strand linked to the taste for rare sensations typical of the ultra-refined aesthetes like Huysmans and Lorrain or to that concept of irregular and extravagant beauty of Baudelairian and Ropsian filiation that followed the assumption“le beau est toujours bizarre.” Examples of this genre can be found in the works of artists such as Albert Besnard with his masterpiece Les morphinomanes, Louis Legrand with Prostitution, Georges de Feure with L’amour libre, and Marcel Lenoir with Le Monstre and L’Éducation.

At the Antonio Berti Exhibition Center, the exhibition gets to the heart of Alfredo Müller’s production, presenting a selection of works related to the landscape theme, with country scenes and city views executed in etchings in black and color mainly in the period between 1902 and 1903, when the artist moved from Paris to Osny. Prominent among them is the scenic series of six large decorative color lithographs known as Frises and intended for the furnishing of homes according to the principles of William Morris, two of which, Les Paons and Les Cygnes, fully manifest his adherence to the Art Nouveau style. They were commissioned by the famous Parisian print dealer Edmond Sagot and are exhibited for the first time in their entirety. Also exhibited for the first time complete is the extraordinarily rare and important suite of La Vie heureuse de Dante Alighieri inspired by the Vita Nuova, consisting of six Dante subjects etched in etching and aquatint, published in Paris in 1898 in only 12 copies by the great art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard, famous for his connections with the Impressionists and the Nabis. The series, loosely inspired by the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, offered an interpretation close to Rosicrucian-brand esoteric Symbolism. It was publicized in the pages of the 1901Almanach du Père Ubu, an illustrated avant-garde yearbook created by the subversive poetics of Alfred Jarry, in collaboration with Pierre Bonnard for the graphic part, in the Rue Laffitte quarry where Vollard had his gallery. Dedicated to this suite will be the Oct. 23 event with music-reading excerpts from Dante’s Vita Nuova and an in-depth look at the engravings that comprise it. It continues at La Soffitta Spazio delle Arti, where a rich and fascinating overview of works illustrates Müller’s engraving activity when he lived in Montmartre, in the quintessential Parisian artistic cradle frequented by the most important and innovative artists of the time.

Divided into six sections-Sight on the Stage, Music, Readings, Children’s Scenes, Women’s Scenes, Symbolist Visions-it presents portraits of Paul Verlaine, dance and theater stars Jane Avril, Cléo de Mérode, Sada Yacco, Sarah Bernhardt, Edouard De Max, Marthe Mellot, and Suzanne Desprès, and the porfolio featuring the great musicians Johann Sebastian Bach, Christoph Gluck, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Richard Wagner. Other engravings depict little Colette, who was the daughter of her friend colleague Steinlen and often played in the garden with cats, a great love of her father’s who drew them everywhere starting with the very famous cabaret poster Le Chat Noir. The child was also practically at home at Müller’s, who made her his favorite model, even multiplying her image by twos and threes in childhood scenes. The two inseparable friends Stéphanie Nantas and Marguerite Thomann, Alfredo’s future bride, are the protagonists of several plates depicting them separately or together. In addition to portraits, other important subjects appear at the “Attic” such as bathers, a typical French theme of the time interpreted by Müller in his own suave and melancholy manner, cats as a tribute to his friend Steinlen, and some Symbolist visions including L’Île heureuse, a dreamscape in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes.

To complete this rich and varied excursus of subjects with masterful post-impressionist, Japonisme, Symbolist and Art Nouveau graphic solutions, a complementary section has been created with a focused selection of folios executed by the artists particularly close, friends and sodalists, along with others related to the dance and theater milieu starting with the most iconic ever, Sarah Bernhardt, to avant-garde theater programs, publishing and bibliophilia with some illustrated books by Octave Uzanne, the poster of "La Revue blanche" and advertisements by publisher Edmond Sagot with engravings by Paul Berthon, Pierre Bonnard, Leonetto Cappiello, Jules Chéret, Eugène Delâtre, Maxime Dethomas, Marie-Charles Dulac, Maurice Dumont, Eugène Grasset, Francis Jourdain, Alexandre Lunois, Gustave Marie, Alfons Mucha, Manuel Robbe, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Jan Toorop, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Félix Vallotton.

The exhibition, produced and promoted by the City of Sesto Fiorentino, La Soffitta Spazio delle Arti - Circolo Arci Unione Operaia di Colonnata, Gruppo Gualdo has as sponsors the City of Sesto Fiorentino, Les Amis d’Alfredo Müller (Strasbourg), Banco Fiorentino - Mugello-Impruneta-Signa.

A catalog (Edizioni Polistampa) with critical texts by Emanuele Bardazzi and Hélène Koehl accompanies the exhibition.

Sunday, Oct. 23, 2022 (4 p.m.) at the Antonio Berti Exhibition Center is scheduled the side event Concert-reading of excerpts from La Vita Nuova and presentation of La Vie heureuse de Dante Alighieri, a series of etchings by Alfredo Müller.

General information: Francesco Mariani, tel. 3356136979 URP Comune di Sesto Fiorentino, tel. 055 4496235-357 www.comune.sesto-fiorentino.fi.it urp@comune.sesto-fiorentino.fi.it www.comune.sesto-fiorentino.fi.it

The Italian Toulouse-Lautrec: an exhibition on Alfredo Müller in Sesto Fiorentino.

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