At the Royal Palace of Milan Grande shows on Felice Casorati

The historical link between the artist and the city of Milan is one of the themes that cross the exhibition and is deepened between the pages of the catalog published by Marsilio Arte. During his long career, Casorati has attributed a strategic function in Milan, the first city in Italy to equip itself with a modern system and art market, recognizing the strategic space for a direct comparison with artistic research at its reviews of the 1920s more updated.

“Casorati at Palazzo Reale” proposes an overall rereading of the artist’s work, retracing in chronological order through 14 the different seasons of his production, from the beginning in the early twentieth century to the 1950s. Over one hundred works presented for the occasion, including paintings on canvas and table, sculptures, graphic works of the symbolist season, sketches for scenography of works created for the Teatro alla Scala, all of absolute importance and refined quality, selected for theirs Explutenant exhibition history.

The loans come from prestigious private collections and important public collections, including the Gam – Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Turin, where the most important and rich museum collection of works by Casorati, the National Gallery is preserved of modern and contemporary art of Rome, the International Gallery of Modern Art Ca ‘Pesaro of Venice, the Museum of the Novecento of Milan, the Mart, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, the Gallery of Modern Art of Genoa, the Modern Art Gallery Achille Forti in Verona, and the Revoltella Museum – Modern Art Gallery in Trieste. The card of the project is the close collaboration with the Casorati Archive, which has ensured the scientific support and consultation and sharing of historical documentary materials.

As the curators observe, “the retrospective has been designed to transport visitors within the poetic universe of Casorati, inviting them to immerse yourself in its environments (the interiors and the study, conceptual theater of its entire poetic), leading them among the figures Pensious and melancholy, reflective emblems of a participant humanity and a profound existential philosophy. The rooms of Palazzo Reale constitute the perfect court context to reconstruct the silent dimension, made of pauses, counterpoints and empty, issued by the works themselves “.

The narration follows the entire chronology of the art of Felice Casorati, documenting the alternation of sources of inspiration and styles, from verism to symbolism, from neoclassicism to magical realism, from the most expressionist phase oriented by Picassian deformations until the return to syntheticism And to the à Plat drafting, characteristics of the end of career production.

The route opens with the first works characterized by a strong realism, including the famous portrait of her sister Elvira of 1907 (private collection) or the heir of the Mart of Rovereto of 1910. An important focus is dedicated to the years spent in Verona, Where the artist moved with his family in 1911. In this city he began his symbolist and secessionist season, fueled by the comparison with nearby Venice, where Casorati attends Ca ‘Pesaro, set up his first personal exhibition in 1913 and meets Gino Rossi , Arturo Martini, Ubaldo Opppi, Teodoro Wolf Ferrari.

The exhibition proposes some of the major masterpieces of the author with the cycle of great tempera and records the evolution of style and language after the definitive transfer to Turin, following the tragic death of the father. Here, in 1919, Felice Casorati settled in the house-Studio where he will live throughout his life. For the first time since 1964, three important paintings characterized by a naked and desolate spatial dimension and a metaphysical sense of disturbing loneliness have been combined in an ideal triptych: a woman (or the wait, 1919, private collection), a man (or Botti man, 1919-20) and girl (or girl with bowl, 1919), both from the Gam collection-Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Turin. The section is completed by the imposing and majestic breakfast (Rivoli Castle – Museum of Contemporary Art. Cerruti Collection), which portrays a family of women, perhaps orphans or widows of war, to summarize the emotional and psychological state of Casorati, intoned to the sense of mourning that pervades the early post -war years.

The masterpieces the woman and the armor of 1921 (Gam Turin) and Silvana Notes of 1922 (private collection), metaphysical icon inspired by the classical measuring measures and the altarpiece of Piero della Francesca, open the masterpieces. The collaboration of Casorati with Riccardo Gualino, collector, patron and entrepreneur dates back to this period, for which the artist paints the family portraits and designs, together with the architect Alberto Sartoris, the small private theater in their Turin residence. The partnership is reconstructed on display by the three portraits Gualino, by the portrait of Alfredo Casella (private collection), composer and pianist, director of some concerts in the Turin theater, and of the dancers Raja and Bella Markman, protagonists with Cesarina Gualino, dance performances Free under the Casoratian friezes of the theater, documented by the bas -reliefs woman with arch, the encounter with music, woman sitting with bowl (private collection).

In 1924 Casorati participated with a personal exhibition at the Venice Biennale, an important moment of recognition and celebrity: of the fourteen works exhibited then, seven are proposed on display. In addition to the three portraits Gualino, they are exhibited, in the dedicated room: Meriggio of 1923 (Museum Revoltella – Gallery of Modern Art, Trieste), a dead nature with mannequins of 1924 (Museo Novecento, Milan), portrait of Hena Rigotti (Gam, Turin ) and dual portrait (private collection). Starting from the mid -1920s, Casorati develops the theme of conversations, an ideal cycle inaugurated by the famous and still intriguing Platonic conversation of 1925 (private collection). The painting, in which next to a sensual female naked female, sits a man with a black hat (he is the architect and friend Alberto Sartoris), was the protagonist of a long exhibition tour with the debut at the first exhibition of the Italian twentieth century in Milan In 1926 and stages in Dresden (1926), in Geneva, Zurich and Pittsburgh (1927), in New York (1928) and at the Expo of Barcelona (1929), where he was awarded with a gold medal.

On display you can admire after many years the extraordinary painting Annunciation of 1927, coming from a private collection: chosen by the artist for the Italian art exhibitions of 1927 at the Musée Rath in Geneva and then to the Kunsthaus in Zurich, he returns today visible to general public. In the rarefied and suspended atmosphere of an interior, Casorati builds an intimate scene in which the divine transpires from specularity and symmetries through the irreconcilability of the opposites: the very natural light and the complex and enigmatic geometry of space. Reinsted for the first time in an anthological, the painting marks an essential episode within the arch of the Casoratian itinerary.

At the end of the decade, Casorati’s art is marked by an anti -lassical turning point, testified on display by the compositions of a series of wonderful death. The painting opens to the landscape, approached in the dialogue between interior and outside in the poetics Daphne in Pavarolo of 1934 (Gam Turin). The cycle of paintings of girls from the 1930s and 1940s was now born, including women by boat from 1933 (Modern Art Gallery Ricci Oddi, Piacenza) and the Pontorno sisters of 1937 (Unicredit ArtCollection), both characterized by a woman who breastfeeding, immersed in suspended and intimate atmospheres.

The last few years are documented by nature, in which the ancient theme of eggs returns (teaches of that “numerus, mensura, pondus” which is the heraldic motto of Casoratian art) and Cimiero – with a dead nature with the helmet ( 1947, Gam Turin), eggs and lemons (1950, Gam Turin) eggs on a red background (1953, private collection) – and new subjects such as Eclipse di Luna (1949, private collection) and parallel (1949, Autonomous Region collection Valle d ‘ Aosta).

Always passionate about music, Felice Casorati was not only an exceptional painter and a passionate pianist but also scenographer, at work, between the 1930s and fifties, for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the work of Rome and the Scala of Milan. Precisely from the historical archives of the staircase there are numerous of his sketches, made for works such as the pods and Fidelio, or for ballets on music by Petrassi or De Falla: a nucleus that, at the end of the exhibition, will also allow you to know this side of the activity of a rigorous and multifaceted artist.

The anthological is accompanied by a large catalog published by Marsilio Arte with the essays of the curators. The exhibition is promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Cultura and produced by Palazzo Reale and Marsilio Arte in collaboration with the Casorati Archive. Sponsor Bper Banca; Atm technical partner, with the support of Coop Lombardia.