Opened to the public in 1910, the Johannesburg Art Gallery boasts a collection of the highest quality in terms of artistic heritage. The halls of the Scuderie di Pavia will have the privilege of hosting an important nucleus of masterpieces from one of the most significant art museums on the African continent, offering the public a unique opportunity to discover and get to know a collection of works that is hardly visible in other locations.
The exhibition presents over sixty works, including oils, watercolors and graphics, which bear the signatures of some of the main protagonists of the international art scene of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries: from Edgar Degas to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, from Jean Baptiste Corot to Alma- Tadema, from Vincent Van Gogh to Paul Gauguin, from Antonio Mancini to Paul Signac, from Pablo Picasso to Francis Bacon, from Roy Lichtenstein to Andy Warhol and many others.
The exhibition itinerary, divided into chronological and thematic sections, will allow visitors to take a journey through the history of art from the mid-nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, ranging from Europe to the United States and South Africa in a story that moves between different historical moments, places and artistic languages.
As well as boasting an excellent selection of works by great Masters, the exhibition will allow the public to discover the fascinating history of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The main protagonist of the birth and formation of the museum collection was Lady Florence Phillips (1863-1940), wife of the mining magnate Sir Lionel Phillips. A woman of great charm, herself a collector, convinced that her city should have an art museum, she persuaded her husband and some industry magnates to invest in the project. Determined to carry on her idea of her, Lady Phillips sells a blue diamond given to her by her husband to buy her early works. Hugh Lane, another great personality of the Anglo-Saxon cultural scene, helps her in the enterprise, suggesting possible acquisitions. Since its opening, the museum has presented a selection of works of extraordinary quality and modernity, a nucleus that has been enriched over the years thanks to new donations.
The itinerary of “Masterpieces of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. From Degas to Picasso” begins with Lady Philips, a splendid painting signed by Antonio Mancini which portrays her at the age of 46. A tribute to this out of the ordinary woman, visionary in projects but concrete in putting them into action. Although she lived longer in England than in Johannesburg, Lady Phillips nonetheless represents a fundamental figure in the history of the country because, thanks to her noble ideals, she managed to create a precious place for the community in which to and promote culture.
Deep ties to England have ensured the South African museum has a good core of works by English masters. The first section of the exhibition itinerary is, in fact, dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon scene of the 1917th century; from the Romantic period – with Turner's representative watercolor Hammerstein under Andernach (1860) – to the glamorous, Victorian period represented by masterpieces such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Regina Cordium (1858) and Sir Lawrence Alma's Death of the Firstborn (XNUMX). Tadema.
The second room of the exhibition offers an overview of the French scene before and during the Impressionist season.
The public will be able to admire important works by Courbet and Corot – promoters with their research of a new approach to reality – up to the famous dancers by Degas, protagonist of that nouvelle peinture later known as Impressionism. To tell the moment of transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be a series of works signed by great names of the European art scene such as Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and many others.
The exhibition itinerary continues with a section dedicated to the XNUMXth century, represented in all its dynamic heterogeneity. Great masters such as Picasso and Modigliani will accompany visitors to the heart of the historical avant-garde period up to the last decades of the twentieth century represented by emblematic works by Bacon,
Warhol, Lichtenstein and many others.
The exhibition closes with a tribute to the South African art scene of the twentieth century. A rare and very interesting opportunity to discover the works of important artists such as Irma Stern and George Pemba.
For the entire duration of the exhibition, a series of educational activities and guided tours for children and adults will allow
to learn more about the splendid works exhibited in the halls of the Scuderie del Castello Visconteo.
On the occasion of the Pavia in Poesia event, on Saturday 21 March, the Stables of the Castello Visconteo in Pavia
will remain extraordinarily open until 22.00 and all visitors to the exhibition "Masterpieces of Johannesburg
art gallery. From Degas to Picasso” will receive a free poem.
The exhibition is conceived, produced, organized by ViDi in collaboration with the Municipality of Pavia and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, with the sponsorship of the Consulate General of South Africa in Milan and realized with the scientific advice of Simona Bartolena.
