The prestigious loan becomes an opportunity for a refurbishment on the upper floor of the Villa, making a comparison possible only at the Magnani-Rocca Foundation; in fact, the works of two of the most important and revolutionary contemporary artists are juxtaposed in three rooms: Paul Cézanne and Giorgio Morandi.
Both chosen by Luigi Magnani, the creator of the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, as fundamental presences for his private art collection, they are linked to him by a common thread consisting of a special elective affinity made up of shared confidentiality, simplicity, rigour, sensitivity and commonality of thoughts; already in 1983, the importance of the two painters was evident in the intentions of the exhibition "From Cézanne to Morandi and beyond", set up in the Villa di Mamiano still inhabited by the collector.
The predilection for Cézanne and Morandi among all the artists in his large collection, repeatedly declared by Magnani, should perhaps be identified in their particular resemblance; the common research in meditation on landscapes and the spatial analysis of still lifes, characterized by a few recognizable subjects and by a careful scrutiny of the slow changes of nature. Cézanne, explorer of the structure of the image, starts from the landscape as a study of forms to its essential terms, electing fruit in particular as an ally against the inexorable intervention of time, modifier by definition. Magnani, who considered the "world of phenomena, the mirror of a higher and more secret truth", bought several watercolors from the French master, a technique which aesthetically perhaps better tells the phenomenal transience of time, in the signs of beloved places and in the provisional nature of still lifes . Through short strokes cleverly studied in the perfect mix of pigments and solvents, Cézanne builds a bold perspective system that analyzes objects from different points of view, translated in the famous declaration on the need to "treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, all put in perspective, so that each side of an object, of a plane, is oriented towards a central point".
This spatial research could not have been indifferent to Morandi who began his journey under Cezannian influence; in fact, he has the opportunity to study Cézanne's paintings reproduced in the volume French Impressionists by Vittorio Pica and follows the writings of Ardengo Soffici in the magazine "La Voce", he also visits the 1911 International Exhibition in Rome where an entire wall was dedicated to the watercolors of the Provençal artist. His early years analyze reality by geometric synthesis, but even later Cézanne will be his constant example, in the use of contrasting tones, in the predilection for the structuring of spaces and masses, for the choice of painting of familiar and affectionate places ; exemplary in this sense is Cortile di via Fondazza of 1954 rendered through solids and geometries in the contrast of light and shadow, or Landscape of Grizzana of 1943, which recounts the link between the Bolognese painter and the Emilian Apennines, as important as the mountain Sainte -Victoire for Cézanne. Even the still lifes inspired by visible reality reflect on the different possibilities of combinations, set in an indefinite time. Then, the use of watercolor also brings them closer, at the moment in which, in the last years of his life, Morandi marks the liquid and fleeting trace of things on paper.
The objects of reality become a mirror of the Self, the bottles, like fruit for Cézanne, neutral elements of which to study nuances and minimal variations. Both refractory to the depiction of human figures, they make only brief exceptions; Morandi making a few self-portraits and a quick foray into the classic theme of bathers in 1915, while Cézanne reworks a theme painted at the beginning of his career and then developed towards the end of his life: the insertion of semi-abstract figures in the landscape, nudes or - nudes on the banks of the river, known as bathers, one of which Esquisse de baigneuses, dated 1900-1906, was purchased by Luigi Magnani for his collection. The pastoral scene of Arcadia is intellectually revived, which has as its main theme the perfect harmony between man and nature. To fully understand the subject, Cézanne made repeated visits to the Louvre, he was inspired by classical statuary, by the works of Poussin, by the great Renaissance and Baroque artists, in particular by Veronese with his colored shadows; the quote is always cultured. The painter's revolution germinates within tradition and myth, to arrive at upsetting the forms, male and female, on a natural and mental stage together, in which the figures become archetypal, soulless and devoid of subjectivity, monumental and proportionally geometrized , like the bottles and objects that Morandi arranged in the theater of his own canvas, also with a highly calibrated compositional architecture and inexhaustible analysis of the relationship between form and space.
Cézanne's work in the Pushkin Museum is unique in this sense; represents a new idyll of contemporaneity, without temporal connotation. The figures, here male, are geometrically articulated and build two triangles and two diagonals that meet; a symmetry of correspondences that also involves the surrounding nature, in which the trees follow the same human positions. The brushstroke lets us perceive a constructive incompleteness, which gives precedence to the sense of composition and contemplation through color and volumes. The architectural solidity, evident in the work coming from Moscow, will be characterized by an increasingly revolutionary power, up to the latest versions of the female bathers, predictive visions that have radically influenced the protagonists of the artistic avant-gardes, including Cubism, and of the painting of research, Morandi included.
What fascinates me is the form, so much so that among the moderns I have chosen Cézanne and Morandi, who have no content.
Louis Magnani.
