The works, mostly from the Edoardo Alfano collection, will be exhibited together with all the other works from the same collection not included in the museum layout of the Gallery: paintings and sculptures by Natale Attanasio, Michele Catti, Ettore Cercone, Domenico Costantino, Mario Mirabella .
The works of the painter and sculptor Jules Van Biesbroeck Jr. (Portici 1873 - Brussels 1965), cosmopolitan and refined artist, of Belgian origin but active in Italy for a long time, represent a testimony of considerable interest, hitherto unacknowledged and little investigated, of the activity of this artist and reveal his late romantic and secessionists combined with the symbolist accents that characterize the stylistic language.
His presence and that of his father in Palermo (also a sculptor, who bore the same name) is due to the enthusiastic admiration of Edoardo Alfano, municipal official, journalist, man of letters, art collector and photographer, one of the most seen in public life in Palermo between the end of the 1908th century and the first decades of the 1909th. The two artists, together with their respective wives, exiled from Belgium occupied by the German army, stayed for a long time in the capital of the island between the end of 1910 and the beginning of 1918, in XNUMX and in XNUMX, guests of Alfano in the house in via Isnello.
Among the exhibited works (paintings and drawings, pastels, marble and bronze sculptures) the series of nine sanguines on paper entitled Delenda Messana, accompanied by verses by Achille Leto in memory of the Messina earthquake of 1908, presented at the LXXIX Exhibition of the Society of Amateurs and Connoisseurs of Rome in 1909 and purchased by the Municipality of Palermo for the Gallery; the intensely elegant marble Portrait of Ennio Alfano and the large symbolist-style plaster Mother Earth, modeled by Van Biesbroeck jr. in collaboration with the father, as a testimony of gratitude for his guest.
In addition to the works of Jules Van Biesbroeck jr. and Jules Van Biesbroeck senior, all the other works from the Alfano collection that are not included in the museum layout of the Gallery will be exhibited for the occasion: paintings and sculptures by Natale Attanasio, Giuseppe Casciaro, Michele Catti, Ettore Cercone, Domenico Costantino, Giuseppe La Manna, Mario Mirabella, Giovanni Nicolini, Saverio Partinico, Salvatore Profeta, Giuseppe Rondini, Giuseppe Rosselli.
In a documentary section, some autographed letters by Van Biesbroeck and a selection of suggestive period photographs taken from the Alfano archive will be presented.
The exhibition “Jules Van Biesbroeck. A Flemish in Palermo in the early twentieth century”, organized by Civita Cultura, is curated by Gioacchino Barbera, Director of the Regional Gallery of Sicily in Palazzo Abatellis, a specialist in Sicilian painting of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the catalog (Torri del Vento editions, Palermo) the writings of the curator, Antonella Purpura, Antonio Di Lorenzo, Erminia Scaglia and the files of the works written by Cristina Costanzo.
