The city of Milano twigs 25 October to 21 December 2013 presents and pays homage the art of Giovanni Factors, 25 years after the historic exhibition held at the Society for Fine Arts and Permanent Exhibition.
Edited by Francesco Luigi Maspes and Enzo Savoia, the exhibition will retrace the fundamental stages of the Livorno painter's career through the selection of forty masterpieces - some of which have never been exhibited in public - from prestigious private Italian collections, such as that of the Milanese Giacomo Jucker or that of the Genoese Mario Taragoni, favoring the works executed between about 1860 and 1905, the period of his full creative and stylistic maturity.
The itinerary will present works of great importance, such as the nucleus dedicated to the military, who feel they are an integral part of that ordinary reality, which Fattori scours, without rhetoric or idealism, in all its aspects. Paintings such as Passage of the Mincio (about 1865-1870), The lookouts (about 1870-1875), Cavaliers on patrol (about 1875), Cavalleggeri in advance (about 1875-1880), Artillery maneuvers (about 1880), The ordinances ( 1883), Militari al bivouac (about 1885), Return from the walk (1885-1890) and The roll call after the charge (1895), will document his long and careful reflection on the ways and times of war, on the reasons and individual dramas, rather than collective ones. The study of this subject led him to perfect his technique, going beyond the descriptive element, thanks to an autonomy in the construction of figures, characterized by a reduced chromatic range, which accentuated the drama of the events.
Equally interesting are the landscape "impressions" of the Maremma, that is of that part of the Tuscan countryside that Fattori "preferred instinctively, feeling freer and purer and closer to the essence of things in the simple and wild solitude of nature". Houses in the Livorno mountains (about 1866-1870), View of Poggio Pelato in Castiglioncello (1867-1868), Sunny avenue (about 1870), Olive grove (1875-1885) and the Wood of San Rossore (1890-1900) will reveal an artist openly "macchiaiolo", singer of nature captured in all its aspects and synthesized through essential chromatic drafts.
These "pure" landscapes are flanked by those animated by human presence, including the Silvestro Lega tablet painting on the rocks (about 1867), in which he exploits and intensifies the grain of the wood to visually recreate the sensation of the wind blowing over the rocks, on which sits the slender figure of the painter friend; or again the idyllic Peasant Woman in the Woods (1861), in which the experimentalism of the "macchia" of the previous years extends to scenes from life and is channeled towards a growing freedom of execution. The same that Fattori also applies to the works dedicated to working in the fields, documented in the exhibition by Riposo in Maremma (around 1867) and by Le boscaiole (around 1878).
The silent calm of these paintings is counterbalanced by the vitality of certain paintings by butteri, such as the two large pastels Incontro fatale (1900) and An Encounter (about 1904). There are also pieces of daily life set against the background of urban landscapes that the artist painted in the early 1880s, including Viale Principe Amedeo in Florence (around 1881) and L'incontro dei barocci (XNUMX).
With Giovanni Fattori. Masterpieces from private collections, the GAM Manzoni Study Center confirms its activity as a cultural institution aimed at promoting and transmitting artistic knowledge in Lombardy. The close bond that binds him to the city of Milan is in this case sanctioned by his collaboration with the Society for Fine Arts and Permanent Exhibition, which makes its archive available for research by the scholars involved in the initiative, including Francesca Dini , one of the leading experts on the artist from Livorno.
The exhibition is accompanied by an Antiga editions catalogue.
JOHN FACTOR. Masterpieces from private collections
Milan, GAMManzoni (via A. Manzoni, 45 – 20121 Milan)
25 October - 21 December 2013
