An exceptional and reasoned selection of works from the years 1915-35 aims to recall the cosmopolitan, magical and cheerful Viareggio of those twenty years, chosen as a place of inspiration, pastimes and amusements by the cultural elite. And it is in this scenario, where everything is harmony, beauty and "joie de vivre", defined by D'Annunzio as "the most beautiful in the universe", that the fervent imagination of Moses Levy is nourished, reviving on the canvas the nuances of sea, the sparkling white of the umbrellas, and the colorful costumes of the bathers. Like a Picasso and a Matisse on the Côte d'Azur, he thus fixes the light of that world, catching with rare perception its effects in the sky, in the waving sails, in the kites through an extraordinary phantasmagoria of reverberations which ends up becoming style.
From the intimate dialogue with Viareggio, a favorite city that more than any other has influenced its visual sensitivity, the Matteucci Foundation has developed the idea of the exhibition dedicated to that long and happy season, during which no other better than Moses Levy has managed to translate the sparkling and roaring image of a holiday and worldly society, in step with the times.
These were the years ranging from the First World War to the Great Depression, but his creative vein reacts decisively against such a dramatic picture with fundamental works, destined to define its European physiognomy.
Born in Tunis in 1885, Moses Levy moved to Italy with his family at the age of ten, maintaining a close bond with that city where he would spend frequent stays. He trained in the highly creative climate of a Versilia in which prominent personalities such as Lorenzo Viani, Enrico Pea, Giacomo Puccini and Mario Tobino stand out. And it is in that strip of land already known by Rainer Maria Rilke as an ideal place for meditation and inspiration, that he establishes himself as a refined interpreter of a "poetics of intimacy" and of "lived life", to take up two happy definitions by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti.
While contacts with some of the most receptive personalities of the Tuscan environment intensified – Plinio Nomellini, Felice Carena, Alfredo Müller, Elisabetta Chaplin – Levy participated in the reviews of the Roman Secession of 1913-'14, and his presence in Viareggio became more assiduous. Here he is one of the supporters, with Carrà, de Chirico, Primo Conti, Depero and the inseparable Viani, of the first exhibitions of "Avant-Garde Art" organized in the summer inside the Casino. Precisely on the occasion of these events and others set up in the halls of the Kursaal, he presents the radiant seascapes, characterized by that unmistakable light and atmosphere of iridescent splendor destined to mark their great fortune.
The exhibition, according to a monothematic design, is concentrated in a targeted selection of about forty philologically related paintings both in terms of chronology and in terms of interpretation. The goal is to connect them in an intimate dialogue aimed at highlighting the eccentric and refined formal language, before that crucial turning point which, from the clear poetics between the two wars, opens up to the restless visual feeling of the mid-twentieth century.
Some of the most famous works can be admired in the Viareggio and Florence venues: Woman in Blue (1917), The White Umbrella (1919), The Beach (1918), Mother and Daughter on the Beach (1919), Anna and her Friend (1920), Beach and figures in Viareggio (1921), Il Bagno Cirillo (1935), Portrait of Enrico Pea (1935), Portrait of Leonida Repaci (1935), as well as unpublished testimonies from international collections. A conspicuous nucleus will be granted by the heirs.
