The Mondadori Group has chosen the summer solstice to inaugurate the permanent artistic restoration of the illumination of Palazzo Mondadori, the building designed by Oscar Niemeyer.

An important renovation project on an iconic example of contemporary architecture, at both the national and international level, with which the Mondadori Group wants to celebrate 100 years of history.

“In recent years, the Mondadori Group has changed, embarking on a new solidity with new prospects, by focusing on the “fundamentals”, the activities related to the publishing of books and magazines, in both traditional and digital forms. And I like to seen an analogy in this capacity to innovate, without forgetting our roots, with the building that Niemeyer designed for Mondadori,” underlined Ernesto Mauri, chief executive of the Mondadori Group, “and that everyday surprises us by its visionary modernity, comprised of solid and traditional architectural elements that are in harmony with extraordinarily creative forms; an architecture that is new each time we look at it, but is, at the same time, history, and, with this new feature, increasingly the future.”

THE NEW PERMANENT ILLUMINATION

The building, which is owned by Gruppo Generali and has been the headquarters of the Mondadori Group since 1975, was built according to three fundamental Vitruvian principles as a way of providing large working spaces for a business that is a symbol of Italian excellence, Mondadori (utilitas or utility): a building constructed on water and on the earth, with strong and solid pillars (firmitas or durability) with a suspended body for the work areas; and, above all, a building with the capacity to express a beauty that aspires to the sublime (venustas or beauty and delight).

Thanks to the permanent illumination designed by the master of light Mario Nanni, the Palazzo Mondadori will be seen in a new light, an intense narrative able to express the life of the building and the structure of its arches.

Mario Nanni has designed a total work that brings together light, cinema, music and publishing; a work dedicated to the daytime and the night-time, for a day-to-day homage to life, thought and beauty. A work for both those who work in the building and those who will see it only from a distance: a work for everyone.

THE BOOK IL PALAZZO MONDADORI

Mondadori’s 110^th anniversary and the realisation of the permanent artistic restoration of the illumination of Palazzo Mondadori, also offer the perfect occasion to present – with the words of Professor Francesco Dal Co, editor of CASABELLA – a new edition of the book Oscar Niemeyer. Il Palazzo Mondadori, by Roberto Dulio (Electa).

The book, which has been completely re-designed since the first 2007 edition, published to mark Mondadori’s 100^th anniversary, retraces the story of the conception and construction of the company’s headquarters between 1968 and 1975: a precise and accurate study that aims to reconstruct the commissioning of the building to the Brazilian architect who went on to place it within a broader cultural context.

«The Palazzo Mondadori is the son of Itamaraty, the Foreign Ministry building completed by Niemeyer in Brasilia in 1964, and much admired by Giorgio Mondadori. The light of the arches of Itamaraty is the same; whereas in the Palazzo Mondadori it varies: a monument in one, a “symphony” in the other, commented Professor Francesco Dal Co, editor of Casabella. Moreover, in the Palazzo Mondadori the floors hang to the cover and float on empty space. But if Niemeyer completed in Milan an exploit that he had only touched upon in Brasilia, this is also due to the companies that produced the special materials used in its construction and the Italian engineers that calculated the static.»

Oscar Niemeyer. Il Palazzo Mondadori includes documents, original and unseen sketches by Niemeyer, plans, photographs of the site and the completed building, as well as a photographic campaign by Gabriele Basilico and a more recent one by Roland Halbe, made after the restoration of the building, that make it possible to retrace the various steps that led to the realisation of the building in a philological, visually enthralling and engaging manner, not only for fans of contemporary architecture, but also for normal readers.

THE INAUGURATION

The new lighting project for Palazzo Mondadori will be presented this evening after sunset with “Sospeso, leggero ma non troppo”, a poem of light dedicated to all those, staff and collaborators,  who work everyday inside this iconic construction.

A story in light and music that will transform Palazzo Mondadori into a canvas on which the illumination will depict the passage of time and offering a new interpretation of its architecture in the night-time. To ensure that real architecture enthusiasts – and others, too – won’t miss the show, the event will be broadcast live this evening on the Mondadori Group’s Facebook page.

«Faced with a monumental building, made of imposing material and with an historical existence, necessarily requires study, respect and listening to the place. A syncretic intervention of high symbolic value which, comprising architecture and landscape, solar phases and chronobiology, brings you up against the infinite rules of natural light through a background that generates light and shadow, that celebrates the beauty of the complex, even after sunset, and making it eternal,» said Mario Nanni.

The twenty-three pillars of the facade will be matched by as many minutes, plus one, the twenty-fourth vertical element that completes the rhythmic composition of the building. The meridian light will caress the building like the page of a book, in a composition that brings together different and complementary knowledge, reaching out beyond time, paying homage to the beauty of the Palazzo Mondadori.

The dialogue between architecture, light, water and fire will last for a total of thirty minutes: twenty-four minutes of poetry, followed by a pause of six minutes, during which the light will stay on to enhance the architecture as a whole, in the magic of the night.

«The choice of the summer solstice to inaugurate my work of light is because it is a special night,” – explains Mario Nanni – “indeed, it is the shortest night of the year, in which we enter the sign of Cancer, whose constellation, during the presentation of the project, will become a great fire that will illuminate the night, with a unique and unrepeatable image of the building,» Nanni concludes.

Opening on 7 June 2017, the Amori Divini (Divine loves) exhibition is curated by Anna Anguissola and Carmela Capaldi, with Luigi Gallo and Valeria Sampaolo. It is promoted by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism and by the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, organised by Electa.
The exhibition offers a journey into the world of Greek myth and into the changing fortunes of stories with two narrative ingredients: seduction and transformation.
It includes more than 20 paintings and sculptures, with a particular focus on those from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Artists such as Baccio Bandinelli, Bartolomeo Ammannati, Nicolas Poussin, Giambattista Tiepolo and many others allow us to follow the fortunes of Greek legends through to much more recent times, but also to understand the role played by ancient images and literary sources in this tradition.

With the Amori Divini exhibition, on the initiative of Paolo Giulierini, the National Archaeological Museum is continuing an exhibition programme, promoted together with the Archaeological Site of Pompeii, that examines the relations and trade between Pompeii, the Roman world, and the ancient Mediterranean. Until 27 November 2017 it will be possible to visit the Pompei e i greci (Pompeii and the Greeks) exhibition in the Large Palaestra in Pompeii.
Amori Divini is accompanied by a catalogue that retraces and examines the key issues of the exhibition, with both theoretical essays on the function and significance of the myths of love and transformation in the Graeco-Roman world, and analyses of the individual mythological subjects and settings the works on display come from. The items of show are examined in detailed entries drafted by experts in the field.

Running from April 13 to September 17, 2017, the exhibition NEW YORK NEW YORK. Italian Art: Rediscovering America is curated by Francesco Tedeschi with Francesca Pola and Federica Boragina, sponsored by the City of Milan – Culture, Museo del Novecento and Intesa Sanpaolo – Gallerie d’Italia, in partnership with the publishing house Electa.

The exhibition unfolds between the two museums and presents, through more than 150 works, the stories of Italian artists who traveled, stayed, worked and exhibited in the United States, particularly New York, or just imagined the New World, all seeking a freer spirit and different models from old Europe.

The Museo del Novecento presents the American imagination and above all the intense relationship with the city of New York, as it was perceived by Italian artists, with works by Afro, Paolo Baratella, Corrado Cagli, Pietro Consagra, Giorgio De Chirico, Fortunato Depero, Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Emilio Isgrò, Sergio Lombardo, Titina Maselli, Costantino Nivola, Gastone Novelli, Vinicio Paladini, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Mimmo Rotella, Alberto Savinio, Toti Scialoja, Tancredi, Giulio Turcato. A separate section is devoted to Ugo Mulas’s photographs of New York and American artists.

The Gallerie d’Italia in Piazza Scala, Intesa Sanpaolo’s museum premises in Milan, will present a broad reconstruction of relations with American institutions, galleries and collectors, who have enhanced the Italian artistic presence in the United States.

Starting from the exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art, presented in 1949 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Gallerie d’Italia is featuring masterpieces by Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, Marino Marini, Virgilio Guidi, Renato Guttuso, Fausto Pirandello, Armando Pizzinato, Alberto Viani, and continues with works by artists of the fifties and sixties such as Carla Accardi, Afro, Gianfranco Baruchello, Enrico Baj, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Alik Cavaliere, Ettore Colla, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Domenico Gnoli, Lucio Fontana, Pino Pascali, Achille Perilli, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Mimmo Rotella, Giuseppe Santomaso, Mario Schifano, Francesco Somaini, Toti Scialoja and Emilio Vedova.

Stolen from the Van Gogh Musem in Amsterdam in 2002, recovered in Italy from a camorra hideout in September 2016 thanks to the work of the Financial Police and the Prosecutor of Naples, the two paintings by Vincent Van Gogh will be exhibited exclusively at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples for only 20 days before their return to the Netherlands.

From Tuesday, 7^th until Sunday 26^th of February The Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen (1884-85) and Seascape at Scheveningen before a Storm (1882) – are key works for understanding the artist’s early development – will be exhibited on the second floor of the museum, next to the Caravaggio Room.

Seascape at Scheveningen before a Storm is one of only two seascapes of Scheveningen painted by the artist at that time, the other being kept at the Minnesota Marine Art Musem. The Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church of Nuenen is a work of sorrowful and intimate memory and family affection. It depicts the church of Nuenen village, where Van Gogh’s father was the pastor.

The exhibition is promoted by the Ministry of Cultural Assets, Activities and Tourism, the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, and financed by the Campania Region. The project is implemented by Scabec Spa. Organization and catalogue by Electa.

Opened on December 8th in the double seat of the National Museum of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome and Giacomo Manzù Museum in Ardea (Rome), the exhibition Manzu. Dialogues on spirituality, with Lucio Fontana retraces, in the aftermath of the Jubilee of Mercy, the parallel experiences of the two sculptors with the liturgical commission in the 50s and 60s. The exhibition documents the common desire of the two artists – Giacomo Manzù (Bergamo, 1908 – Rome, 1991) to work for the Vatican, Lucio Fontana (Rosario, 1899 – Comabbio, 1968) for the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano – to renew the traditional iconography in contemporary terms and the fertile relationship that came to be created in this way with their respective stylistics developments.

Open until 5 March 2017, the exhibition is organized by the Museum Pole of Lazio under the auspices of the Pontifical Council for Culture and in collaboration with the municipality of Ardea and the Fondazione Giacomo Manzù. They have also collaborated Sapienza University of Rome, Department of Architecture and Design and the CSAC – Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione of Parma. The catalog is published by Electa.

Again in the capital – even for a few days (until 15 January 2017) – do not miss the exhibition Jean Arp, dedicated, fifty years after his death, to one of the major protagonists in contemporary art.

Staged in the Great Halls of the Baths of Diocletian, the large retrospective of French master is promoted by the Superintendence for the Colosseum and the central archaeological area of Rome and the Roman National Museum in collaboration with Electa: about 80 works, including sculptures, reliefs, tapestries and papier collés giving an overview of Arp’s wide-ranging experimentalism, from the first wooden reliefs of 1915 to the sculptures made from 1930 to 1966.

About two hundred photographs are at the core of Picasso Images. Works, Artist, Character. The exhibition outlines in new ways not only the path of an exceptional artist, but also the most intimate portrait of a man who has built its worldwide fame. The rich selection of images is accompanied by a significant selection of graphic works, sculptures and paintings from the Musée National Picasso -Paris that frame his artistic evolution.

The exhibition, promoted by Roma Capitale, Assessorato alla Crescita culturale – Sovrintentenza capitolina ai beni culturali, it is designed by Electa in collaboration with the Musée National Picasso – Paris and is organized with Zètema Progetto Cultura.

The exhibition is hosted at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome until 19 February 2017.

The Museo del Novecento with Electa presents BOOM 60! That was Modern Art, an exhibition sponsored by the City of Milan – Culture, and dedicated to art from the early fifties to the early sixties and its reflection in the popular mass media.

The exhibition at the Museo del Novecento will run from October 18, 2016–March 12, 2017, curated by Mariella Milan and Desdemona Ventroni with Maria Grazia Messina and Antonello Negri. It inaugurates the new exhibition spaces with a complex layout between the Arengario and Piazzetta Reale with an exhibit design by Atelier Mendini.

The exhibition, thanks to the extension of the museum layout into the new galleries assigned to the museum, seeks to explore the themes of Italian art in the 20^th century while enriching the permanent museum layout. In the conception and choice of artworks, as well as loans from museums and public and private collections, it proved possible to draw on the rich collection of the Museo del Novecento: paintings and sculptures of the city’s heritage from the Boschi di Stefano collection, which is not on permanent display, and so makes a fascinating discovery.

BOOM 60! explores modern art as it was recounted from the early fifties to early sixties in the weekly and monthly illustrated press, the popular newsmagazines. 

These were the boom years, when not only the economy and consumption were soaring, but also the sales of illustrated weeklies and monthlies: Epoca, Tempo, Le Ore, Oggi, Gente, L’Europeo, Abc, Oggi, L’Espresso, Vie Nuove, La Domenica del Corriere, La Tribuna Illustrata, Successo, Panorama, L’Illustrazione Italiana, Settimana Incom Illustrata, Lo Specchio, Settimo Giorno. Their readership peaked in this period, with a circulation far greater than that of the newspapers, making them an important means of entertainment, as well as a faithful mirror of the collective outlook and aspirations. 

What emerges from the pages of these popular magazines is an alternative picture of modern art and its protagonists, contrasting with the evaluations of cultivated critics. Artistic innovations clashed with the expectations of the general public, who were highly suspicious of them. The magazines often fomented their readers’ prejudices, and at others sought to “educate” them by relating the art world to the forms of mass culture.

The exhibition, with a spectacular exhibit design by the Atelier Mendini, reflects these varied aspects of Italian visual culture in its decisive phase, drawing widely on the Milanese context, as the center of the major commercial publishing houses and much of the most advanced artistic research.

Some 140 works of painting, sculpture and graphic design – chosen in relation to their particular success in the mass media – create a dialogue in four sections: “Major Exhibitions and Controversies”, “Artists in the Magazines”, “Artists and Celebrities”, “The Market and Collecting”,  with the most popular photographic and TV illustrations of artworks and artists. A rich documentary section, like a great ‘’newsstand’’ from the past organized in  the Sala Archivi of the Museo, presents the public with the magazines and their different ways of recounting modern art, from the covers to feature articles, from criticism to advertising columns, from illustration to photojournalistic images, together with a selection of eight works from which the Dino Buzzati’s Piazza Duomo di Milano.