From Wednesday 30 November to Sunday 4 December 2016 the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome exhibits the painting The Tempest (1938), an absolute masterpiece by the painter Fausto Pirandello (Rome 1899-1975). The work, of which traces had been lost since 1939, was recently rediscovered in an Italian private collection. The exceptional rediscovery was previewed to the public on Tuesday 29 November 2016 by Fabio Benzi and Flavia Matitti, curators of the important anthological exhibition Fausto Pirandello. Works from 1923 to 1973 in progress in Rome in the spaces of the Galleria Russo, until 14 December 2016. Promoted by Roma Capitale, Department of Cultural Growth-Capitoline Superintendence of Cultural Heritage.
"The storm" was painted in 1938, at the height of Pirandello's creative activity (oil on plywood, 150×225 cm, signed lower left: «Pirandello 1938»). A work of ambitious and impressive dimensions (it is the largest composition painted by the artist) it is certainly one of the greatest masterpieces not only of his production, but of Italian art between the two wars. The work was exhibited for the first time in February 1939 at the III Quadrennial of National Art in Rome, where Fausto Pirandello, a forty-year-old painter already awarded in the previous edition, had been invited with a personal room that caused a sensation. «In this paradisiacal serenity and in such monotony of purgatory – Raffaele De Grada shrewdly observed on the pages of «Corrente di Vita Giovani» – some rooms, such as that of Fausto Pirandello, represent hell».
The Gallery of Modern Art, which until December 4 is hosting the exhibition entitled Rome in the Thirties. The Gallery of Modern Art and the 1931 – 1935 – 1939 Quadrennials of Art, dedicated to the first historical editions of the National Art Quadrennials, therefore appear to be the ideal setting in which to exhibit this exceptional rediscovery to the public for the first time.
The storm was then sent to the United States and exhibited in the fall of 1939 at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. From that moment the painting disappeared from circulation. Considered lost by scholars, it was known only from the black and white illustrations published at the time.
«The storm - explains Fabio Benzi - represents a scene which, as always in Pirandello, accentuates the surreal and dramatic aspects of a meager, existentially suffering reality. The idea comes from a vision of a summer storm in the countryside of Anticoli Corrado, the town near Rome where many artists lived. Here in particular lived Emanuele Cavalli and Giuseppe Capogrossi, his friends and associates in the first elaboration of the Roman School. The tonalism, which starting from their research had become the leading youth language in Italy in the XNUMXs, is expressed here through an excavation research into the reality of bodies and things, which generates a sense of alarm and restlessness. The drama of the storm, a metaphor for an impending disaster, seems to presage the destruction of the war that will soon break out, with the disorderly flight of figures whose terror is reified in the raised skirts that transform the women into gloomy ghosts, images of desperation and faceless terror. The miraculous imprinting of a dry leaf on the purplish black of the wind-torn skirt shows how the ineluctability of nature is impassive to that terror. Pirandello gives the scene a visionary and disturbing solution, through spatulated figures, with everyday positions and gestures, but as if blocked in rhythmic and unnatural compositions: figures dominated by an immanent, disturbing and surreal anxiety. Through the investigation of a distorted space, always planing on diagonal and unstable patterns, the artist composes those empty spaces that consciousness cannot fill in its complex relationship with reality. He returns to us without rhetoric, through a rough and at the same time sumptuous material, a painful human condition, of extraordinary spiritual strength ».
The work, recently found in a private Italian collection, had belonged to the Sicilian journalist Telesio Interlandi (1894-1965), a much-discussed character and yet a friend of the Pirandello family. «In addition to this painting - says Flavia Matitti - it is known that Telesio Interlandi owned several other works by Fausto Pirandello, including The Frogs, purchased in 1939 at the III Quadrennial. However, the painting, depicting three boys collecting frogs, was seriously damaged during the war and only the upper half of the work survives today in a private collection».
Leonardo Sciascia was one of the first to take an interest in the controversial intellectual and human story of Interlandi, founder and director of the newspaper «Il Tevere» since 1924, of the literary weekly «Quadrivio» since 1933 and of the notorious fortnightly «The defense of the race» since 1938 , who planned to deal extensively with the Interlandi affair. After his death the project was taken up by another Sicilian, Giampiero Mughini, to whom we owe the biography A via della Mercede there was a racist (Rizzoli 1991), still one of the few studies dedicated to Telesio Interlandi.
The loan and the exhibition of the work were made thanks to the interest and contribution of the Galleria Russo in Rome.
