This shows "Towards Monet” intends to tell the study of nature starting from the seventeenth century, to reach the water lilies painted by Claude Monet in the first part of the twentieth century.
Using over ninety paintings and ten precious drawings from some of the major museums in the world, as always, and from some precious private collections, the exhibition will be divided into five sections, which will describe the fundamental moments linked to the narration of nature as an autonomous fact and independent of the insertion of the figures. In short, that sort of emancipation of the image when the landscape is no longer seen as a mere scenographic backdrop, but stands out as an absolute and dominant divinity.
For this reason, the exhibition will examine the pivotal points of a story that will become increasingly central in the history of art, up to the nineteenth century, which has rightly been called "the century of nature". Therefore, without expanding to innumerable and fragmented experiences, it will remain rather narrow to the fundamental cornerstones. And in this sense, the title of the exhibition confirms the idea of the enormous change implemented by Claude Monet starting from the second half of the XNUMXs, he was busy at that time painting in the forest of Fontainebleau and on the coasts of Normandy on the wake of Boudin. Monet who passes from the noble sense of reality, which Corot before him came from a secular tradition – highlighted in this exhibition -, and pushes himself with the final water lilies, but already with the "series" of the last decade of the nineteenth century , towards the open field of a landscape which, not forgetting reality, now rests almost entirely on inner experience. Thus opening up to some of the most beautiful and new manifestations of nature painted during the twentieth century. Monet therefore as a paradigm of the new landscape, the crossing point between a before and an after. For this reason, his presence will cover a large part of the entire exhibition, with twenty paintings. A real exhibition within the exhibition.
So the exhibition will move from the introductory experiences of Annibale Carracci and Domenichino, up to those, from the first two derivative and fundamental ones, of Lorrain, Poussin and Salvator Rosa in the seventeenth century to document the transition from the false to the true of nature, to then go into the 'Always seventeenth-century Holland of Van Ruisdael, Seghers, Van Goyen and Hobbema among others, when the truth of seeing founds the modern landscape. And a dozen drawings from Lorrain to Rembrandt, from Koninck to Van Ruisdael, will mark the importance of this technique in the direct exploration of nature. To therefore immediately meet some artists who have been milestones for the new image of the landscape. As some subsequent events will tell you well, in the eighteenth century and again in the nineteenth century. For the eighteenth century, the choice was first to stop on Van Wittel, for the birth of the concept of view, and then a suggestive, and important, Venetian thrust between Canaletto, Bellotto and Guardi to summarize the wonderful age of the Venetian view, with around twenty works mostly from American museums and for this reason rarely or never exhibited in Italy.
To then enter the XNUMXth century, with the essential figures of Turner, Constable and Friedrich, those who redraw the idea of nature within the new romantic spirit. The various realisms will therefore take the exhibition between the France of the Barbizon, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and America of the Hudson River School. Until Monet arrives to overthrow, first using the elements of realism, the concept of painted landscape. And thus allowing himself to be joined by impressionist and post-impressionist companions, from Renoir to Sisley, from Pissarro to Caillebotte, from Degas to Manet. To reach the fundamental experiences of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne. All present with nuclei of selected works, starting with the seven by Vincent van Gogh, thanks to the usual, precious collaboration of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. To mention just two of the lending museums, which then range from the National Gallery in Washington to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, from the Stedelijk in Amsterdam to the Szepmuveszeti in Budapest just to name a few among many. The exhibition is curated by Marco Goldin.
