Trieste, the Sartorio Museum dedicates an exhibition to Piero Marussig

The Civico Museo Sartorio in Trieste is hosting from July 8 to October 9, 2022 the exhibition Piero Marussig. Room with a View of Trieste, curated by Alessandra Tiddia and Lorenza Resciniti and promoted by the City of Trieste - Department of Culture and Tourism Policies.

It was in 1906 when Piero Marussig returned to Trieste after sojourns in Munich, Rome, Vienna, and Paris: he bought a villa in the hills, later known as Villa Maria, now half-destroyed, a source of inspiration and subject of many of his works. Some of these can be seen in the exhibition itinerary, which aims to pay tribute to one of the greatest exponents of 20th-century art in Trieste and Italy. Also on display are some masterpieces from the Civic Revoltella Museum and private collections.

“It could only be the Sartorio Museum, a house-museum, a jewel set on the hill of San Vito to host this essay in Trieste painting,” said Lorenza Resciniti. “First because from the windows of the second floor, where the works are set up, there is a magnificent view of the rooftops of the city’s houses, the gulf and the coast, as Marussig offers it in his paintings. Secondly,” the curator continues, “because this venue of the Civic Museums of Trieste is the ideal place, because of its atmosphere of domestic intimacy, where one likes to be in silence observing the inside and the outside, to exhibit the works included in this project, precious paintings normally kept by a loving private collector, who today generously makes them available to us all.”

The exhibition design, curated by Federica Luser for Trart, presents the main moments in Marussig’s oeuvre. The Trieste one collected in the Chiadino villa and the Milanese one in which the artist was a protagonist of the Novecento Italiano season.

The works from his years in Trieste (1906 to 1919) reflect his perception of a “macrocosm enclosed in the microcosm of his home, where interior and exterior, nature and city, private life and social life coincided. Chiadino was his Tahiti,” as Elena Pontiggia writes. "For an intimist painter, indeed as intimate as he was, nature did not exceed the perimeters, however wide, of his garden, and all he needed to paint life were the figures and things he saw in his rooms, on the white gravel esplanade in front of the villa, in the park of trees and plants that surrounded it."

Siesta (1912), Evening in Trieste (1914), Concertino in the Park (1916) are just some of the works in the exhibition related to this theme. Paintings imbued with a sense of intimate affluence, that"Gemütlichkeit" which is difficult to translate into Italian, but which corresponds to a sense of harmony between oneself and one’s surroundings, as Alessandra Tiddia noted in the course of her studies devoted to the artist. Piero Marussig’s paintings are windows open to the city and closed to contain an intimate world made of affections and “small and beautiful things.”

The exhibition design then dwells on the Milanese period, which began in 1919 with his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Vinciana in Milan, which opened to the artist the doors of the critics and those of Margherita Sarfatti’s salon, effectively introducing him to the Italian artistic milieu. In 1920 Marussig moved to the Lombard city and from then on exhibited alongside those painters who believed in translating classical Italian modes into a modern language: Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Emilio Malerba, Ubaldo Oppi, and Mario Sironi.

Juxtaposing his own research with that of his colleagues, Piero Marussig abandoned expressive color and gave greater solidity to his figures, transforming that intimate everydayness typical of the works of Trieste into a suspended and idealized dimension.

Until 1932 Piero Marussig would participate in all the group’s activities, exhibiting at important shows in Italy and abroad.

Hours: Thursday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Free admission.

Photo by Municipality of Trieste

Trieste, the Sartorio Museum dedicates an exhibition to Piero Marussig

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