From 21 November 2014 to 22 February 2015, Palazzo Reale in Milan hosts the exhibition “Form and Desire. The Cal – Pirelli Collection” which presents a selection of about 200 photographs taken from Pirelli calendars from birth to today.
The exhibition – curated by Walter Guadagnini and Amedeo M. Turello, promoted by the Comune di Milano-Cultura with the sponsorship of Expo and organized and produced by Palazzo Reale and GAmm Giunti – was born thanks to the
fundamental contribution by Pirelli which, for the purposes of the exhibition selection, has made its archive available, with thousands of photographs by the greatest world photographers.
“A project that restores the right artistic dimension to one of the most important communication campaigns of the last fifty years, which has been able to enter the imagination of each of us thanks to the timeless charm of the models and the talent of the photographers who have realized”, declared the Councilor for Culture Filippo Del Corno. “GAmm Giunti – says Filippo Zevi, managing director GAmm Giunti – is pleased to have started the production of the exhibition 'Forma e Desiderio', which offers about two hundred images taken by the greatest photographers of the last fifty years, to create every year the edition of the Pirelli Calendar”.
“GAmm Giunti – continues Filippo Zevi – thus confirms its attention to the masters of world photography, both as a producer and as a privileged partner of initiatives dedicated to this
wonderful art form. In an exhibition season marked by major events, this exhibition represents an unmissable opportunity for the Milanese public to retrace the best photography has been able to produce in half a century of history, and to get in touch with a universe of enormous charm and formal elegance ”.
“All the great photographers featured in the Pirelli Calendar – claims Walter Guadagnini – from Stern to Weber, from Avedon to Newton, from Testino to Sorrenti, from Ritts to Lindbergh and beyond, are confronted with history, with symbols and mythologies, with scenographic devices and with abstract compositions, with the explicit search for seduction – perhaps even only that of the place, not necessarily that of the body – in a suspended time, between reality and illusion, all elements
they return constantly but with different weights in the individual choices, and which however give the overall figure of an extraordinary photographic adventure".
“An adventure – concludes Walter Guadagnini – which is still far from having exhausted its driving force today, despite the years and the incredible social, technical, cultural and taste changes through which it has passed, not only unscathed but every once strengthened".
According to Amedeo M. Turello, “For more than fifty years the images of the Pirelli Calendar have been part of our culture because, as in few other projects in which photography is the protagonist, they are
witnesses of particular changes, of new fashions, of new ideas and of many creative and technical inventions. Today we can see with the eyes of the greatest photographers how reality has changed and how the way of
representing it has evolved”. “The intention of this exhibition – recalls Amedeo M. Turello – is, instead, to set aside for a moment the chronological order, the succession of years precisely marked by the calendars, to forget the
temporal references in a process of critical re-reading capable of proposing a new dialectic, made up of relationships, analogies, quotations and contrasts between images". With a narrative path that goes beyond the typical chronological scan
of the calendars themselves, the “Forma e Desiderio” image gallery offers a thematic itinerary, following a process that explores and combines relationships, analogies, quotations and contrasts between the images of over half a century. The exhibition develops through five rooms, each of which is dedicated to the elements that unite the photos contained in the space: from seduction to provocation, from myth to elegance.
The exhibition opens with the section The enchantment of the world in which those photographs are presented which, at least until 1972, were made with the intention of guiding the viewer through two fundamental elements such as the landscape and the expression of the models. The landscapes are those characteristic of the escape to tropical paradises, or they are interiors, as in the Sarah Moon series, in which the protagonists abandon themselves to the dreamy dimension detached from the time of reverie. These are attitudes and places that in the collective imagination found, in those years, their correspondents in the pages of Love Story and in the settings of the first James Bonds and which return as references in the cycles of John Claridge of 1993, of Herb Ritts of 1994 , by Peter Lindbergh 1996, by Bruce Weber 2003 o
by Mario Sorrenti of 2012.
One of the most recurring characteristics in the various years is that of the learned quotation, of the d'aprés, or rather of a non-competitive relationship but one of respect towards some of the monuments of the history of art of the past. In The photographer and his muse (seduced by art) we analyze the homage to Leni Riefenstahl that Arthur Elgort dedicated to her in 1990, or that of Clive Arrowsmith who the following year elaborated a sequence of quotations from the masters of the art such as Delacroix, Velázquez, Rembrandt.
Particular is the case of Annie Leibovitz who quotes verbatim not only the masters of photography but some precise images, in order to transform the pages of the Calendar into a sort of deliberately, and provocatively, academic taste exercise.
Alongside these photographs will be found those originating from symbols, mythological figures, incarnations, in which artists such as Joyce Tenneson and Karl Lagerfeld make the models assume the role of the Greek muses of the arts.
The section The indiscreet gaze is centered on images characterized by a mixture of provocation, play, transgression, which mark another of the elements characterizing the very identity of the Calendar.
From Harri Peccinotti's '1969', printed on the shirt of one of the girls with a not involuntary double meaning, to the number '10' attached to Terry Richardson's briefs, the section will review the works of Helmut Newton and his typical language of refined voyeuristic matrix, and of the more recent and more alluring Mario Testino, Bruce
Weber, Patrick Demarchellier, all singers of an eroticism that declares itself in its essence. The models portrayed are deeply carnal, in which provocation and humor go hand in hand.
From the outset, the Pirelli Calendar proposes the presence of images built on the principles of photographic modernism, in which the photographic vision of detail, the transformation of the world according to the chosen point of view, the metamorphosis of things thanks to the framing, are elements crucial elements of language which, over the years, have also had an impact on genres and professionalism.
In The Nature of the Artifice you can admire the shots of Brian Duffy, of Peter Knapp, up to reaching the top in the reconstruction of the world through geometries, inspired by the tire tracks on the bodies of the models, of Uwe Ommer; or again by Barry Lategan, or by Nick Knight, author of one of the most anomalous and surprising editions, dedicated to underlining a linguistic experimentation that goes beyond the genre of composition with figures for
reach the limits of pure abstraction.
The exhibition will close ideally with The body on stage which underlines how, in the history of the Calendar, the combination of model and environment has assumed a central role in the conception of the series created. This is the case of Norman Parkinson or Bert Stern where people, places, clothes become character, stage, set
cinematographic, costume, photographic studio no longer hidden from the viewer but revealed in its essence as a great construction machine of a parallel reality. A conception that is condensed in Peter Lindbergh's surprising sequence of 2002, where the model plays herself interpreting the Calendar, in a total and
refined overlapping of roles and places. In a no less striking way, Peter Beard stages an authentic journey into exoticism through a game that seems to provoke the viewer and invite him and
reflect on the boundary between reality and one's own projections. The exhibition is accompanied by a GAmm Giunti catalogue, with texts by Walter Guadagnini, Amedeo M. Turello and Alberto Barbera and the biographical notes of the 42 photographers.
Presented for the first time in 1964, the Pirelli Calendar reaches its forty-second edition with the year 2015, created by Steven Meisel.
Until now, the most important retrospective exhibition, set up by the architect Gae Aulenti, was held in 1997 in Milan (Palazzo Reale – Sala delle Cariatidi) and in Venice (Palazzo Grassi), to then leave for a world tour that touched some of the major world capitals such as Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Buenos Aires and Tokyo.
