Milan, the Museum of the Twentieth Century doubles its spaces: it will become a large arts hub

Milan ’s Museo del Novecento (Museum of the Twentieth Century ) will become the city’s largest museum of contemporary art: in fact, the Milan City Council on Tuesday approved the guidelines for the international design competition for the expansion of the Museo del Novecento at the second Arengario in Piazza Duomo. The NovecentoPiùCento project (this is the title given to the expansion) aims to double the museum’s spaces to make it a large hub reserved for modern and contemporary arts, which will house collections, spaces, services, a conservation laboratory, a cafeteria, and a bookshop. A goal that the Milan administration announced on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the museum’s opening on December 5, 2010: since then, more than 4 million visitors have walked its halls, helping it become one of the symbols of the city’s culture.

Created with the aim of spreading knowledge of 20th-century art after a journey of several years that began under the junta of Gabriele Albertini (the original idea belongs to that administration’s councillor for culture, Salvatore Carrubba), today the Museo del Novecento, located in the Palazzo dell’Arengario in Piazza del Duomo, houses the collections that the city has inherited and acquired over time (there are about six thousand works) and exhibits more than four hundred of them to the public. From Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Fourth Estate, a work-symbol of the museum, to the unique Forms of Continuity in space by Umberto Boccioni, and then masterpieces by Amedeo Modigliani, Vasilij Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, the Futurists, Giorgio De Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, Marino marini, and Arturo Martini, all the way to great postwar art with Alberto Burri, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana, Azimuth artists such as Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi, and then the masters of arte povera from Jannis Kounellis to Gilberto Zorio and Luciano Fabro, kinetic art, programmed art, and pop art.

Now, the conversion of the Second Arengario (a project that has been talked about for some time: there was initially the intention to start it on the occasion of Expo 2015, then the project was postponed) will lead to the increase of the Museum’s spaces by more than a thousand square meters, which will allow the exhibition of more than one hundred new works and to reread the entire museum itinerary that currently unfolds in the Primo Arengario, ranging from the Historic Avant-Garde to the 1980s, thus reaching the 2000s, close to contemporaneity. The Second Arengario, which now houses the Offices of the Department of Sport and Leisure and City Hall 1, had been designed together with its twin building in the 1930s by architects Griffini, Magistretti, Muzio and Portaluppi, then decorated by bas-reliefs on the facade by Arturo Martini and later renovated by Italo Rota, as a monumental entrance to Piazza Duomo. Its reconversion will allow, in the intentions of the Milan administration, an enhancement of the entire Arengario complex, which will thus be able to regain its completeness and a new balance.

The design, the Milan City Council points out, will have to take care of all the historical, environmental, tourist and architectural implications of this transformation, since it is a historic building overlooking Piazza del Duomo, the heart of the city not only for the Milanese, but also for tourists from all over the world. For the headquarters of City Hall 1, the administration has already promised maximum efforts to find a new location, appropriate to the symbolic value and functional importance of the institution. However, the doubling of the museum will face a major unknown, at least according to Corriere della Sera: the high cost of the operation. In fact, the newspaper recalls that the renovation work on the first tower of the Arengario alone cost 28 million euros for an area of 8,200 square meters, including 4,000 square meters of exhibition space: finding the funds in a pandemic period, the Corriere speculates, will not be easy, although the newspaper also reports an indiscretion that there would already be some donors willing to put on the scales a figure that fluctuates overall between three and four million euros.

“Ten years after its inauguration,” says Mayor Beppe Sala, "the Museo del Novecento is not only growing, but doubling. The exhibition itinerary dedicated to the art of the 20th century will also have the spaces of the Second Arengario at its disposal to complete its narrative, up to the 2000s. The NovecentoPiùCento project will guarantee over a thousand more square meters, thanks to the conversion of the Second Arengario (now home to offices of the Department of Sports and Recreation and City Hall 1), and will allow new works to be exhibited. Today, in the Council, we set the guidelines for the international design competition that will allow, with this expansion, to make the Museum of the Twentieth Century a single large exhibition complex dedicated to modern and contemporary arts, able to place itself among the main Italian and foreign museums."

Milan, the Museum of the Twentieth Century doubles its spaces: it will become a large arts hub

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