Trieste, Revoltella Museum displays its collection of self-portraits

From June 30 to October 9, 2022, Museo Revoltella - Gallery of Modern Art in Trieste presents the exhibition Through the Face. Self-Portraits from the Collections of Museo Revoltella, curated by Susanna Gregorat, a selection of mostly unpublished works from the museum’s prestigious collection of self-portraits, which in its entirety has about 120 paintings.

The exhibition is part of the wide-ranging and articulated exhibition project launched in recent months byERPAC FVG dedicated to the theme of the artist’s portrait and self-portrait. It is the fourth initiative and follows the exhibitions Io, lei, l’altra. Photographic portraits and self-portraits of women artists at Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste, Artist+Artist. Contemporary Visions at the Regional Gallery of Contemporary Art “Luigi Spazzapan” in Gradisca d’Isonzo and Reflections. Self-portraits in the mirror of history at Palazzo Attems Petzenstein in Gorizia.

For the realization of this exhibition, a collaboration agreement was signed between ERPAC FVG and the Municipality of Trieste, with a view to the enhancement of the regional museum system and the production of a project of relevant interest for the research and development of the territory.

Through multiple facets, the overall path, declined on the four exhibitions, sees the central theme of the self-portrait become the device of reflections related to representation, the role of the artist, the art system looking at the ’Artist’ through the eyes of the ’Artists’, to grasp its image, in its ’mythical’ dimension, through its projection in portraits and self-portraits. The necessary introductory premise of this assumption is represented by the Gorizia exhibition entitled Reflections. Self-Portraits in the Mirror of History, which offers a path through eight sections and nearly seventy works, mostly on loan from prestigious Austrian museums, such as the Belvedere in Vienna. The Revoltella Museum’s exhibition, which concludes the series of four openings in the region in order, complements and completes this extraordinary gallery of ’faces’ and timeless artistic personalities, protagonists of a dialogue at once unusual and fascinating with the visitor. A multifaceted narrative, which unfolds in different chapters, focusing each time on the many possible perspectives that the theme of self-representation ends up intercepting.

In 1958, the Triestine Roberto Hausbrandt, one of the best-known coffee industrialists in Italy, decided to donate to the Revoltella Museum a collection of forty-five self-portraits purchased from Luigi Devetti, manager of a famous trattoria in the city, frequented since the 1920s by local artists. A patron and generous host in his cozy establishment, Devetti had pursued a rather unusual goal for some thirty years: to form a collection consisting exclusively of self-portraits, often given to him in exchange for a good meal. Hausbrandt then bought fourteen more in turn and made a further donation to the Trieste gallery between 1962 and 1967 and again in 1994, adding some important pieces to the original collection, including Arturo Nathan’s exceptional 1927 Asceta.

The sixty self-portraits already owned by Hausbrandt do not, however, exhaust the entire collection of this portrait genre at the Revoltella Museum, which, by the 1950s, already included more than twenty pieces, taking its origin from the very first years of the museum’s existence, in 1884, with the donation of the circular Self-Portrait (1851) by the Piran painter Cesare Dell’Acqua. In the decades that followed and up to 2013, with the arrival in the collection of theSelf-Portrait (1937) by Felicita Frai, the Revoltella Museum’s collection of self-portraits grew further to include no less than one hundred and twenty paintings.

Therefore, on the occasion of this important initiative promoted by ERPAC, the Revoltella Museum seizes the opportunity to exhibit to the public the other “half,” almost unpublished, of its extraordinary collection of self-portraits, built up over a century and a half of the museum’s life.

The time span in which the works in the exhibition fit extends from 1840, with the iconic Self-Portrait by Giuseppe Tominz (on display on the first floor of Palazzo Revoltella - Tominz Room), to the mid-1970s, with the delicate self-portrait of the ’magnetic’ Leonor Fini. The names that are certainly better known in the local art scene, such as Augusto Tominz, Cesare Dell’Acqua, Umberto Veruda, Arturo Fittke, Ruggero Rovan, Giuseppe Barison, Leonor Fini, Silva Bernt, Cesare Sofianopulo, and Piero Marussig, are juxtaposed with the figures of local artists less known to the public, such as Francesco Guerrini, Edoardo Variano, Franco Cernivez, and Riccardo Carniel. Among the ’outsider’ artists, of particular interest and originality for their interdisciplinary artistic value, are the Tuscan Enrico Sacchetti and the Lombard Giuseppe Novello. Finally, by the great Neapolitan artist Vincenzo Gemito, a leading figure in verist sculpture of the second half of the 19th century, the Revoltella Museum preserves, in addition to the renowned Pescatoriello sculpture, an incisive Self-portrait in pen and pencil, decidedly compelling for its expressiveness.

Among the curiosities of this important collection is also the donation of seven self-portraits, made in 1972 by Colonel Antonio Fonda Savio, an illustrious figure in the territory of Friuli Venezia Giulia, as well as the consort of Letizia Svevo, son-in-law of the writer Italo Svevo.

A narrative, the one presented in the exhibition, and developed in ERPAC’s project on the four exhibition venues involved, that aims to solicit questions in the visitor, to warn against the pitfalls of stereotypes, in a continuous relationship between past and present, between history and contemporaneity. For it is the very “device” of the self-portrait, in its play of mirrors and gazes, that forces the viewer to go beyond the surface of the image and grasp its layered complexity.

The theme of the self-portrait and artist’s portrait at the center of the extensive exhibition project promoted by ERPAC in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region was developed through four exhibitions: Reflections. Self-Portraits in the Mirror of History at Palazzo Attems Petzenstein in Gorizia (May 28-October 2), the exhibition of photography and site-specific works Artist+Artist. Contemporary Visionsat the Spazzapan Gallery in Gradisca d’Isonzo (May 14-September 18), the photographic exhibition Io, lei, l’altra. Photographic portraits and self-portraits of women artists at the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste (March 3-July 17) and the exhibition Attraverso il volto. Self-Portraits from the Collections of Museo Revoltella at Museo Revoltella - Gallery of Modern Art, Trieste (June 30-October 9, 2022), which presents a selection from the museum’s prestigious collection of self-portraits.

For all information, you can visit the official website of the Revoltella Museum.

Pictured: Cesare Dell’Acqua, Self-Portrait (1851; oil on canvas, 40x40 cm; Trieste, Museo Revoltella - Gallery of Modern Art, inv. 81)

Trieste, Revoltella Museum displays its collection of self-portraits

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