La Ferrero Foundation of Alba , GAM – Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Turin, in collaboration with the Superintendency for Historical, Artistic and Ethno-anthropological Heritage of Piedmont, are preparing to pay homage to Felice Casorati (1883 - 1963) with a large anthology that can be admired at the Ferrero Foundation, in Alba, from October 25, 2014 to February 1, 2015.
Happy Casorati. Collections and exhibitions between Europe and the Americas – curated by Giorgina Bertolino, co-author of the General Catalog of the artist's paintings – is a solo exhibition dedicated to research, public history and the international reception of Casorati's painting, from the XNUMXs to the XNUMXs.
Forty of the sixty-five paintings that will be exhibited in the rooms of the Foundation come from national and international museums and institutions. Some, acquired and shipped from Italy in the first decades of the XNUMXth century, represent veritable unpublished exhibits for today's public.
Among the Italian lending museums, the Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Turin, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the International Gallery of Modern Art of Ca' Pesaro in Venice , the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, custodian of the VAF-Stiftung Collection, RAI-Italian Radio and Television.
Among the lending museums in Europe, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Center Pompidou in Paris; in the United States, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; in Brazil, the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo.
The collaboration of the GAM of Turin – custodian of the largest public collection of works by Felice Casorati – confirms the scientific setting of the project, supported by the Scientific Committee chaired by Danilo Eccher, director of the Turin Gallery and composed of authoritative personalities: Edith Gabrielli, Carlo Sisi, Ester Coen, Flavio Fergonzi, Maria Cristina Bandera, Luigi Cavallo, Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, Virginia Bertone.
«My painting, which was received so severely at home, found cordial, sometimes enthusiastic acclaim abroad. Many magazines dedicated articles to me. I was invited to have solo exhibitions in Germany, Belgium, America, France and even Russia. The Galleries of Europe and America hosted my paintings only too willingly».
With these words, in 1943, Felice Casorati recounted his artistic career across the border in the Aula Magna of the University of Pisa.
Happy Casorati. Collections and exhibitions between Europe and the Americas brings together a nucleus of philologically consistent works with respect to the origin and history of the exhibitions, with paintings belonging to museum and private collections, acquired or exhibited abroad and in the halls of the Venice Biennale, the great exhibition in the last century of the function of League of Nations of the art. The works have been identified among those that Casorati himself, during his long artistic career (which began in 1907 and ended with his death in 1963), chose to present in international exhibition contexts. Celebrated as one of the masters of 1910th-century Italian art, Felice Casorati was the protagonist of that renewal of artistic language which found a space for exchange and comparison in the Venice Biennials and in the venues of the European and American exhibition circuit. He took part in important celebratory exhibitions including, in 1929, the Exhibitions for the Argentine Centenary of Buenos Aires and for the Centenary of Independence in Santiago de Chile; the Universal Exhibitions of Barcelona in 1935 and of Brussels in 1937; the Paris International Exposition in 1929. Present at numerous exhibitions dedicated to contemporary Italian art, at the traveling exhibitions of the Novecento art movement (in Geneva in 1930, in Latin America in 1931, in Stockholm and in Helsinki in 1955), and in the post-war , at the Documenta in Kassel (where he was invited for the first edition in 1924), the artist competed for prestigious prizes such as the one promoted by the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, where he was present from 1939 to 1950 and then in 1927, and for which he was member of the jury in XNUMX.
The anthology Felice Casorati. Collections and exhibitions between Europe and the Americas sets out to analyze this composite exhibition map, taking the Venetian Biennale as a privileged point of observation. There are twelve editions documented in the rooms of the Foundation, through single works (1907, 1910, 1912) or through conspicuous groups (each of five, seven paintings) which will allow us to reconstruct the artist's participation in the exhibitions of 1924, 1938, the 1942, 1952, up to the posthumous 1964.
The exhibition is introduced by the Portrait of his sister Elvira, with which Felice Casorati made his debut at the Venice Biennale in 1907, launching his first pictorial season, characterized by paintings with figures which, still according to naturalistic canons, decline the theme of female ages: The old wives of 1908 (Gallery of Modern Art Achille Forti, Verona), sent two years later to Santiago del Cile, Le hereditiere (MART, Rovereto – VAF-Stiftung Collection), exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 1910, Little girl on a red carpet ( Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent) presented in the 1912 edition where it was acquired by the Belgian government.
Alongside some of the most famous masterpieces – Portrait of Maria Anna De Lisi (1918), Target Shooting (1919), Eggs on the chest of drawers (1920) – the exhibition traces the itinerary of choices made by the artist on the internal side of painting and on that of its official presentation. What emerges is a Casorati who favors the portrait on important occasions.
In the exhibition the recurrence of the genre will be underlined by a real "gallery of portraits": those dedicated to his wife Daphne Maugham, the patron Riccardo Gualino and his family, the pianist and composer Alfredo Casella, the Russian dancer Raja Markmann, Hena Rigotti, the engineer Gino Beria, the German spouses Kurt and Elisabetta Wolff (whose portrait will come from the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich), the painter and pupil Riccardo Chicco (on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston). Relatives, friends, intellectuals, artists, are part of the cultural and cosmopolitan environment that the artist frequents throughout the XNUMXs.
Happy Casorati. Collections and exhibitions between Europe and the Americas offers a unique opportunity to admire, side by side, extraordinary works that are normally distant. This is the case of the Mother (Neue Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin), exhibited at the XIV Venice Biennale in 1924, which the public will see together with some of the works that the artist decided to present at the time: Mannequins (Museo del Novecento, Milan) , the Portrait of Hena Rigotti (GAM, Turin), the Concerto (RAI, Turin) and the three Gualino Portraits, brought together again thirty years after the exhibition From Ancient Gold to the Twenties which presented them in Turin in 1982.
The Portrait of Maestro Alfredo Casella of 1926, the Portrait of the engineer Gino Beria of 1925-1926 (GAM, Turin) document Casorati's participation in the international exhibition circuit in the second half of the 1928s, while Ospedale (GNAM, Rome), Gli scolari (Gallery of Modern Art "E. Restivo", Palermo) and Beethoven (MART, Rovereto, VAF-Stiftung Collection), reconstruct part of the ensemble presented at the XNUMX Venice Biennale.
Among the works exhibited in the 1930 edition, the Portrait of a Girl (Gallery of Modern Art, Genoa) and in the 1934 edition, Pomodori of the Szépmuvészeti Múzeum in Budapest.
The section of works from the XNUMXs opens with the Venus bio
nda of 1933 (Centre Pompidou, Paris). Exhibited in 1937 in the Italian Pavilion of the Exposition internationale in Paris and acquired by the French state in 1938, the canvas was requested on loan in 1952 for the room at the Venice Biennale that Casorati himself conceived to anthologize his own pictorial history. Loans from the Detroit Institute of Arts will allow the Portrait of My Wife, exhibited at the Carnegie Prize in 1933 and 1936, and Icarus, presented in the 1939 edition, to be seen for the first time in Italy.
The important nucleus of four paintings belonging to the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo will document the following decade, at the same time recording the exemplary collecting story of Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho, an Italian-Brazilian entrepreneur and patron.
The series of album sheets that collect the tiny design drawings with which Casorati used to trace, with a few essential signs, the ideas and variants of his future paintings also belongs to the GAM of Turin. In these formats of a few centimeters, set up in a special section, the visitor will be able to recognize many of the works arranged on the walls of the exhibition.
During the opening period of the exhibition set up in Alba, the GAM of Turin will present a selection of drawings by Felice Casorati, coming from the museum's Cabinet of Prints and Drawings. Organized in the Wunderkammer, the exhibition of drawings will be curated by the deputy director Riccardo Passoni.
