Ponti

Spice – An unexpected Inferno, where the light and colors of the Mediterranean take the place of the gloomy shadows of the underworld. And then Minos, Achilles and Polissena to replace Paolo and Francesca, fantastic characters and metaphysical landscapes to populate Purgatory, and finally the soft, ethereal and evanescent contours of Paradise, the last kingdom, placed “neither above, nor below, nor below right, nor on the left but exactly in the center of the chest of the man who has faith”.
It is Dante’s Divine Comedy filtered through the sensitivity and imagination of Salvador Dalì, in fact a new parallel journey into the psyche and suggestions of the artist from Figueres who finds himself confronted with Dante Alighieri’s masterpiece and with himself.
To welcome the one hundred color woodcuts by Dalí, which tell and reinterpret Dante’s journey in an original and revolutionary way Divine Comedythe fourteenth-century masterpiece whose first foreign language translations were in Castilian and Catalan, the Firmafede Fortress of Sarzana will be from 26 November to 5 February (Spice).
The Medici complex of the Sarzanese walls will be the setting for the exhibition Salvador Dali. Dante and the journey of genius, curated by Gina Ingrassia, promoted by the Municipality of Sarzana and organized by Comediarting.
The town that hosted the great poet at the beginning of October 1306, when he stayed there in the role of “ambassador” of peace to successfully settle the long negotiation between the Malaspina dello Spino Fiorito and the Bishop Count of Luni, now makes homage to his most famous work through an excursus on Divine Comedy and a compelling dialogue between two geniuses of culture united by an interpretation of the world that opens up to suggestive metaphysical scenarios and visionary worlds, albeit distant in time and space.

The Fortress of Sarzana | Courtesy of the Municipality of Sarzana

The one hundred color woodcuts are the result of an ambitious project with a long and articulated history. In 1949 the Italian government, in view of the celebrations for the 700th anniversary of the birth of Dante, which would have taken place in 1965, commissioned Dalí a monumental work which included the illustration of the Divine Comedy. But this project, due to ups and downs and reasons independent of the artist’s will, underwent continuous variations, never reaching completion in the hypothesized form. The watercolors created by Dalí finally led to the creation of one hundred woodcut tables, the result of a further five years of work with the involvement of some of the best master engravers of the time. This colossal work recounts Dante’s work while representing at the same time the synthesis of the personal and artistic journey of the surrealist genius.

If in the exhibition in Sarzana the visitor expects to trace a punctual correspondence between images and Songs, he will be disappointed, since Dalí stages a “new” Divine Comedy, selecting on the tables the episodes closest to his personal history and the characters who tease his imagination and which belong in some way to his psychic universe. The exhibition itinerary follows the correspondence between image and song elaborated by the German scholar Wolfgang Everling. And so from Hell illuminated by the dazzling light of the Mediterranean, the public is ferried among the fantastic characters who inhabit the thirty-four tables of Purgatory, the “middle world”, understood as a bridge between the dreamlike and surreal atmospheres of Hell and the celestial iconography of Paradise. In this universe the artist adopts a pictorial register which bears witness, in the forms and work of his protagonists, to the complex effort of “climbing”.

Salvador Dalì, Purgatorio, Manfredi, “blonde was and beautiful and of kind appearance, but one of the eyelashes had divided a blow” © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation by SIAE 2022

However, the great evocative power of the images emerges in Paradise, the last realm, placed by Dalí “neither above, nor below, nor to the right, nor to the left but exactly in the center of the chest of the man who has faith” where it emerges, again once, the metaphysical and psychological conception of Comedy. In his journey in the footsteps of Dante, Dalí also retraces his artistic evolution in full, gathering together the entire iconographic baggage populated by hangers, rhinoceros horns, flying bones, soft objects, operating a synthesis of that multifaceted inner universe which he pours into his art where mysticism and surrealist atmospheres converge, the liquefaction of time and space, references to classical art and the masters of the Renaissance. In this suggestion, the eye gets lost in the brightness of the color and in the evanescence of the images to find itself in the otherworldly worlds created by Dante, giving us a new and unexpected universe in which to immerse ourselves.
“The added value of the exhibition Salvador Dali. Dante and the Journey of the Geniusbeyond the pure cultural value and its undeniable contribution in terms of beauty – explains the curator Gina Ingrassia – lies in the possibility of comparing, through the dialogue between two extraordinary figures, different ideas, visions and philosophies, highlighting more what differences and testifying through this the topicality of their work”.

To provide the public with an interesting term of comparison between different cultures and figurative languages ​​in relation to the visual interpretation of a literary work, eleven plates will be on display, including etchings and monotypes, part of a three-handed work, conceived in 1999, and which involved three well-known illustrators on a project by the Nuages ​​gallery and publishing house. In charge of translating the canticles of the Divine Comedy in order to give the prints a precious edition of Dante’s poem available today, Lorenzo Mattotti and Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) dedicated themselves respectively to the illustrations of Hell and Paradise, while the American Milton Glaser illustrated the songs of Purgatory. Nine of these tables, characterized by a melancholy sweetness, are included in the exhibition itinerary.
The exhibition will be open every day, except Mondays, from 10 to 13 and from 15 to 19.

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• The Theater-Museum of Figueres: a Dalì dream

World – His frugal and enigmatic still lifes with flowers, vases, bottles in the foreground, but also the panoramas that immortalized the surroundings of his home in Bologna, must have captivated the musicologist, collector, art critic and entrepreneur Luigi Magnani.
The Emilian patron was in fact a close friend of George Morandi, whose works he was able to appreciate for the first time in an important retrospective organized on the occasion of the Rome Quadrennial in 1939. However Luigi Magnani and Giorgio Morandi would only shake hands the following autumn, thanks to their mutual friend Cesare Brandi who suggested to Magnani to accompany the artist to Colorno to visit the collection of Glauco Lombardi. The collector accepted, and the two finally met.
Over time, the seal of their long friendship would be art, but also a sincere affection, so intense as to induce Morandi himself to paint, for the first and last time in his life, a commissioned canvas (at the request of his friend ).
At the time of their first meeting Morandi was almost fifty years old and already an established artist. Thus, over time, the collection of works belonging to Luigi Magnani, created entirely during the painter’s lifetime, became an expression of the friendly custom that bound the two, also considering the jealous care with which the artist selected the recipients of his paintings.

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life with Basket of Bread, 1921, Etching on zinc plate, 22.2 x 16.6

Now this extraordinary collection characterized by 50 works by Morandi belonging to the Magnani-Rocca Foundation is about to leave the entire two rooms of the Foundation of Mamiano di Traversetolo (Parma) to be exhibited for the first time in the UK at the Estorick Collectionon the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the gallery’s inauguration, as part of the exhibition Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation. From January 6th to April 30th the public will be able to follow the entire process of acquisition of the collection, but also the story of this long friendship, leafing through the masterpieces an intimate collection, from the first works acquired by Magnani such as Flowers in a small vase (1928) and Zinnias in a vase (1932) – engravings given to him by the artist shortly after their first meeting – to the canvases purchased directly from the painter friend during the following 20 years, choosing pieces that cover Morandi’s entire career.

Indeed, after their first meeting, Magnani did not hesitate to communicate to Morandi his sincere admiration for him and for his art, expressing his interest in purchasing some of his creations. Among the gems arriving in London, part of the Magnani Collection, there is also a rare self-portrait and a mysterious one Metaphysical still life from 1918 and one Still life with musical instruments (1941), the first and last painting that Morandi agreed to paint on commission. It was commissioned by Magnani himself with a request that revealed a lack of knowledge on the part of the young collector modus operandi of the Bolognese brush, decidedly reluctant to work on commission.

Giorgio Morandi, Self-Portrait, 1925, Oil on canvas, 47.5 x 61 cm

Despite the initial embarrassment, Morandi accepted the assignment and painted a work that is unique not only in the context of Magnani’s collection but also in the artist’s style. Morandi replaced the instruments supplied by Magnani with much more modest objects: a small trumpet, an old mandolin and a toy guitar bought at a flea market. The collector would later regret not having understood or respected the sensitivity of his painter friend: “I left happy, but unaware of the great and generous gesture he was making by agreeing to paint his first (and last) picture on commission ‘” he wrote.

From that moment, and for the following twenty years, Magnani would buy directly from the artist, during their meetings in Bologna or in his villa. Their relationship was far from being driven by purely commercial motives and art slowly became just one of many common interests. That between the two is a friendship that goes beyond art to embrace everyday life, as evidenced in the numerous exchanges of letters, the thanks for the grapes received or for the jam recipe sent to the sisters.

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1942, Oil on canvas, 42 x 36 cm

Having met the artist only in 1940, the refined collector had to fill a series of gaps in his collection, relating for example to works from previous periods. So he began to look for the missing pieces of his puzzle. These pieces include the rare 1925 portrait, which he bought from the Milanese collector Gianni Mattioli, the masterful Still life metaphysics from 1918, purchased at auction in the early 1970s after the artist’s death, or the group of engravings he acquired from the Prandi Antiquarian Bookshop in Reggio Emilia. In addition to a selection of rarely exhibited still lifes, the collection, soon to be in London, includes some landscapes, such as the one depicting the panorama from the artist’s studio, and views of Grizzana on the Apennine mountains, where Morandi spent long summer holidays.

The exhibition at the Estorick Collection will also include a series of drawings and watercolors – essential masterpieces – alongside a significant group of etchings, in which, with his extraordinary ability to capture the different nuances of tone, light and shadow, Morandi – who was also for many years professor of engraving at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna – shows off his mastery.

The exhibition Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation it will therefore be a rare occasion to admire, outside of Italy, extraordinary paintings belonging to an intimate collection. Paintings of which Magnani used to say: “I loved them so much because for me they carried a message whose value seemed to go beyond everything, beyond any sensible element, beyond painting itself”.

Giorgio Morandi, Courtyard in via Fondazza, 1954, Oil on canvas, 53 x 48 cm

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“There will come a time when the painting will no longer be enough. The pictorial works will be swirling musical compositions of huge colored gases”.
Challenging centuries of immobility, once and for all freeing sculpture from closed forms and classical beauty, Umberto Boccioni, worthy pupil of Giacomo Balla, rummaging in the seeds of an era in which the first airplane, the first car, the first telegraph, weaved the roots of modernity.
“Futurism adopts movement as its principle and sole end. The development of a bottle in space and unique forms of continuity in space begin the only truly great evolution of contemporary art” wrote Lucio Fontana in 1951.
And it is no coincidence that the American archistar Frank Gehry has openly declared: “Boccioni’s lesson was the basis for the design of my futuristic buildings such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao. The straight lines of my constructions, in the tension to cut through the air, have become deformed, becoming an arc, a parabola, a trajectory indeed”.

James Bradburne in FORMIDABLE BOCCIONI | © ARTE.it

“We all live, like Boccioni, Freud and Einstein, without knowing what the future holds for us, just as Einstein in 1907 did not foresee the full impact of his awareness that energy and matter are related. However, Einstein’s future, Freud’s and Boccioni’s have largely been realized. It is to dwell on Boccioni’s modernity James M. Bradburne, director of the Pinacoteca di Brerain Milan, a casket that houses some extraordinary masterpieces by the master such as Brawl in the Gallery and theSelf-portrait of 1908.
Bradburne’s is one of the authoritative voices that, in the unpublished documentary entitled FORMIDABLE BOCCIONI written by Eleonora Zamparutti and Piero Muscarà and directed by Franco Rado, produced by ARTE.it Originals in collaboration with ITsART and Rai Cultura, and available exclusively on Its ARTreturn the faithful portrait of the brilliant, restless artist, the first actor of Futurism.

Frame from Formidabile Boccioni | Courtesy of Goldschmied & Chiari , Artificial Landscapes, 2021 | © ARTE.it

Having become a painter in an unconventional way, Boccioni, embracing Marinetti’s revolution, dedicated his life to inventing a new contemporary language to express modernity in painting and sculpture. The turning point was 1910, when, on 21 February, Boccioni met the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism, in Milan. And from the same year is also one of Boccioni’s masterpieces kept in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Fight in the gallerycomposed in the months immediately following the signing of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910), where the painter uses – and exaggerates – the pointillist technique to study the movements of the crowd and to create unprecedented effects of light and dynamism, accentuated by the use of vibrant complementary colors.
It was precisely in Milan, attracted by the new technological spirit that animated the city, that Boccioni had moved after a period spent in Rome, disappointed by the artistic climate of the capital where the ferment and novelties stirring in Europe did not find any resonance.

Let’s talk about 1910. Why was the first decade of the 20th century so extraordinary?
“There has probably never been such a period. These are the years in which Freud publishes the first writings on the subconscious, Einstein formulates the theory of relativity, Picasso is the first to lay the foundations of Cubism. We are talking about dynamic years, of rupture, which witness the culmination of resistance and the desire to change the world”.

Umberto Boccioni, Brawl in the gallery, 1910, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, From the Emilio and Maria Jesi Collection. Dimensions: 76×64cm

What was Milan like in those years and how did it influence Boccioni?
“Milan was at the center of modernity in Italy. And here we have the Galleria, a very modern building in itself, a huge temple of shopping that extends in four directions. And then there is Boccioni who is making a transition from an already innovative style of painting to something else, and is on the verge of making a discovery. As a young artist he is looking for a new language capable of expressing the ideas of an era in which the first airplane, the first car, the first telegraph peep out. We see an artist who is experiencing the birth of modernity”.

What years were those?
“Futurism was consolidated around the figure of Marinetti, but it needed a catalyst. This was happening in all the major European centres, in Paris, in Moscow, in London. There was an anxiety related to the future – because there was extreme optimism about the kind of world we could create with machines that could do things – but also an anxiety that came from a world that was clearly collapsing. We are at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, we are at the end of a world order. A few years after the end of the First World War, Boccioni himself died. It’s a moment where he looks forward with excitement. On the other hand, Futurism also suggested that modern ideas were a way to sweep away the rubble of the past”.

However, it was Paris that won the title of world art capital…
“Marinetti, Balla, Carrà and Boccioni were part of the Italian ferment of modernity, but naturally the center of the cultural universe was not Milan, but Paris. In Paris we would have met Picasso, Giacometti, Duchamp, Surrealism and the Dada movement made their debut in Paris. Everything important in the artistic world happened in Paris. It was obvious that for a young artist looking to the future and wanting to create a new world, there was only one place to go and that was Paris”.

Frame from Formidabile Boccioni | © ARTE.it

Yet Paris was not found so prepared to welcome the revolution of the Futurists. Why wasn’t the French capital ready yet?
“We have to consider that in different ways the Parisian public was still very relatively conservative. Paris was not only the center of the cultural world, but it was also the heart of the European economic world. The press did not take futurism well but we must also consider how the artistic community has received it. Picasso also lived in Paris and Picasso was understood by that small group of people which included artists such as Bocconi, Marinetti, Carrà. They understood that.”

What did the war represent? What is the modernist battle of the futurists?
“Young people in those years saw war as an opportunity to be knights on white horses, to be heroes. They saw war as a healthy and necessary operation in Europe to get rid of the old monarchies and old encrustations. In the eyes of a thirty-year-old in 1914 it was necessary to create a bright new world in which airplanes and cars would go fast and everything would work out. It was an idealistic and deeply optimistic vision of a utopian future. They thought that modernity could wipe out the problems of the old world, and that’s why they were interested in the aspect of fascism that promised to clean up everything, to overcome the old bureaucracy to overcome the old political class, nepotism. A modernist battle was being fought. Boccioni died in the war because he believed in war understood as a cleaning operation, in England, as well as in France or Germany ”.

Did Americans understand modernism earlier than others?
“Absolutely. And to prove it are people like Alfred Barr (the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ed). Certainly it is curious to think that in America until the 1930s and 1940s there were galleries that were bombed for showing modernist art because they used to say “even my son would be able to do it. Even in America in the 1930s ideas were contested, but there were visionaries like Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York which today boasts the best collection of modern Italian art”.

What is the world of art imagined by Boccioni?
“The world of art imagined by Boccioni is one that goes beyond the definition of the object and the frame, it is the world we live in today, a world in which culture and visual culture are available in the form of sound, light of experience. We are living his vision of the future, he stood on the threshold, just as Einstein in 1907 did not foresee the positive and negative effects of his awareness that energy and matter are interrelated. Einstein’s future, Freud’s future, and Boccioni’s future have actually been largely realized.”

Frame from Formidabile Boccioni | © ARTE.it

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• Boccioni’s works to see in Italy
• Traveling with Boccioni. The masterpieces to be admired in the world
• Formidable Boccioni. The futurist genius in a documentary film
• Ester Coen talks about Boccioni, the painter who challenged the futurists with strokes of light and dynamism