exhibition

The Museo del Novecento museum and Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace, together with Liberty and our publishing house Electa, present the FuturLiberty Exhibition from April 5, 2023.

The exhibition, under the scientific curatorship of Ester Coen and artistic direction of Federico Forquet for the fabrics, delves into the history of the futurist movement in an unprecedented way, through a selection of paintings and applied arts exposed in the two seats of the Modern and Contemporary Art Museums of the Municipality of Milan. The works of the futurist movement’s protagonists, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Fortunato Depero are harmoniously combined with the Vorticist paintings of contemporary English artists, such as Percy Wyndham Lewis and Christopher Nevinson, starting from the “Vital English Art” manifesto of 1914, signed by Europe’s avant-gardist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. These artists in turn represented the source of inspiration that guided Federico Forquet and Liberty’s design team in the creation of two new collections.

The inspiring avant-gardes of Futurism and Vorticism express the transition from past practices through a sharp outlook towards the future, by influencing the culture expressed in traditions and in all forms of everyday routines. Strength, energy and dynamism all reflect the vitality of the forms that boosted the creativity of Liberty’s designers throughout the different eras.
Art life, leisure and identities are recombined into a futurist aesthetic, into a vision aimed at reshaping principles and traditions.

The project includes over 200 works in 2 seats. At the Museo del Novecento museum, the exhibition is focused on the interdisciplinarity of avant-garde movements. This unprecedented and fascinating journey is divided into 8 sections, varying from Futurism and Vorticism with essential works of the Museo del Novecento museum’s collection, of which 15 created by renowned authors such as Boccioni, Balla, Severini and Carrà, and others borrowed from prestigious Italian and international institutions, among which the MART of Rovereto, GAM of Turin, Banca d’Italia, Tate, British Council, Estorick Collection, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, William Morris Gallery of London, Sainsbury Centre of Norwich; all there to be compared to the designs of the Liberty collections.

Moreover, images of Milan’s stylish buildings will be projected to further appreciate its Liberty-style architectures. This journey combines architecture and decorations with the designs of the prestigious London archive, thus highlighting the stylistic influence of floral and geometric patterns to reveal a close connection between these two cities.

In the Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace, the focus is instead oriented towards the extraordinary creativity which characterises Liberty’s story and its past and present designers. For the first time since the V&A of 1975, which celebrated its centenary, the paintings, drawings, tapestries, fabrics, clothes, furnishings, photographs and a wide selection of unpublished materials from the Liberty archive will be exhibited in 8 rooms, starting with a section dedicated to its partnership with William Morris.
The exhibition reveals the influences that most affected both the careers of some great masters, among which William Morris, Bernard Nevill and Federico Forquet, and the ideas that redesigned the future throughout the eras by glancing back at the past. The fabric connects the beginning and end of a journey through shapes, colours, patterns and refractions of light.

A guide of the Museo del Novecento museum and Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace leads visitors through this artistic journey, organized by Electa and curated by Ester Coen.

The Museo del Novecento museum houses the largest collection of works from the futurist movement, also thanks to the recent loan of some precious masterpieces of Boccioni, Balla, Severini, among others, from the Gianni Mattioli collection. The futurist gallery offers visitors a one of a kind opportunity to get acquainted with the most renowned Italian artistic movements worldwide, right in Milan, where the main historical events of this movement unwound. The exhibition, dedicated to the connection between Futurism and English Vorticism, thus finds its ideal seat at the Milanese institution.

The Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace: has the task of presenting, preserving and producing evidence of the changes that Milan embraced. The Art Gallery houses paintings, drawings and sculptures representative of the historic, urban and social evolution of the Milanese capital. Milan’s custom and fashion collection is exhibited alternately according to thematic exhibitions and continuously allows to reflect on the interdisciplinarity of decorative arts and design. This is the perfect setting for taking part in Futurliberty, whose focus is dedicated to the study of the connection between art and fashion through the works of great masters of Futurism and Vorticism.

Liberty is the avant-gardist of design and decorative arts since 1875. It is internationally renowned for its fabrics, in particular for its floral patterns, but also for a long history of experiments with bold geometric designs reminiscent of the shapes and colours of the early 20th-century’s avant-garde art, in particular of those created by Italian futurists and English Vorticists. The extraordinary archive of over 50.000 drawings and prints from the beginning to present day is a constant source of inspiration. For Liberty’s 150 years, the esteemed interior couturier and designer Federico Forquet has curated a striking new range of fabrics – the FuturLiberty collection – aimed at bringing Liberty’s creative legacy into our era. The collections are produced in the northern Italian plant, in Lombardy, using both innovative digital technologies and century-old techniques.

From 26 October to 12 February 2023, the exhibition “Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life” will be at the National Roman Museum in Rome.

For the first time in Italy, Palazzo Altemps presents an exhibition celebrating the spirit of Bloomsbury, the London district where new forms of life and thought, which transformed the Victorian principles and strong patriarchal spirit with which the twentieth century was still imbued, were developed. After the death of their widowed father in 1904, Virginia Stephen, later Woolf, and her siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian moved from the affluent district of Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury. Starting in 1905, a large group of young men and women would meet in the house in 46 Gordon Square to invent a new, free life.

Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life is a project of the National Roman Museum and the Electa publishing house, developed in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery of London. The exhibition highlights the original soul of Palazzo Altemps, an aristocratic mansion in the heart of Rome.

Conceived and curated by Nadia Fusini – a connoisseur of the British author who edited the two volumes in the Meridiani series – in cooperation with Luca Scarlini – writer, playwright, storyteller, performance artist – the exhibition examines the complex intellectual friendships of the Bloomsbury group through books, words, paintings, photographs and the possessions of the protagonists of this adventure in art and thought.

The story of the members of the Bloomsbury circle unfolds in five rooms of Palazzo Altemps. The young intellectuals who met in the home of the Stephen sisters shared artistic predilections, romantic relationships, innovative creative experiences, social thinking. Individuals with strong personalities, they would become left-wing economists, historians, writers, thinkers and painters, and, often, very famous. They dreamed, like Leonard Woolf, of a classless society or, like Virginia, of a world without ivory towers for its artists; John Maynard Keynes revolutionised economic thought and laid the foundation for the welfare state, and for state support of the arts; Lytton Strachey invented a new form of biographical writing, while critic and painter Roger Fry established a different way of looking at and creating works of art. In addition to the undisputed value of equality, economic equality first and foremost, another essential principle for the group was the recognition of the singularity of each individual.

It is no coincidence that the exhibition is housed in Palazzo Altemps, previously home to a prestigious library – built up between the end of the XVI and the XVII centuries by Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps and his nephew Giovanni Angelo, and later merged with the Vatican Apostolic Library – and, in the nineteenth century, to distinguished literary salons. It was here, in the Church of St. Aniceto, built within the fabric of the palazzo, that in 1883 Gabriele D’Annunzio married Maria Hardouin di Gallese, a daughter of the last family to live in Palazzo Altemps.

Edited by Nadia Fusini and Luca Scarlini, the exhibition catalogue published by Electa is organised as a personal dairy, a collection of notes and memories, a visual story including essays by distinguished authors, which examines the key themes of the exhibition: the protagonists, their houses, their romantic relationships, their literature, their relations with the arts and publishing, to build up a portrait of one of the most important cultural groups of the twentieth century.

The National Roman Museum with the Electa publishing house and the support of the Italian Virginia Woolf Society have organised a wide-ranging program of events linked to the themes examined by “Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Inventing Life” will be at the National Roman Museum in Rome. Nadia Fusini and Luca Scarlini will meet the public on a series of occasions to talk in depth about and celebrate the fascinating story of the Bloomsbury group.

The exhibition will be open until 12 February 2023. For information about times and tickets:

museonazionaleromano.beniculturali.it/palazzo-altemps

From 6 October 2022 to 22 January 2023 the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa presents the grand exhibition “Rubens in Genoa” dedicated to Pietro Paolo Rubens (1577–1640) and his relationship with the city. The exhibition was produced by the City of Genoa with the Palazzo Ducale Cultural Foundation and our publishing house, Electa, and thanks to the support and participation of the sole sponsor, Rimorchiatori Riuniti S.p.A.

The curator is Nils Büttner, professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart as well as Chairman of the Centrum Rubenianum in Antwerp, and Anna Orlando, a Genoese independent scholar and co-curator of the exhibition “The Age of Rubens” held at the Palazzo Ducale in 2004.

Sixteen sections of the exhibition are set up in the rooms of the Sale dell’Appartamento of the Palazzo Ducale on the main floor of the building. Paintings, drawings, tapestries, furnishings, precious accessories and antique books are also exhibited together. There are over a hundred works, demonstrating the greatness of an artistic capital visited by one of the greatest artists of all time. It’s a selection that affirms the name of Superba that was given to Genoa, where Rubens stayed several times between 1600 and 1607. It’s also a selection that allows us to retrace and, in many cases, to reconstruct the relationship with the Genoese patrician, one which continued even after the master’s return to Antwerp.

Thirty works attributed to the Rubensian oeuvre: eighteen autograph works, together with paintings that definitely left the painter’s workshop under his supervision and with direct work by him, in addition to two priceless accounts of lost works known through subsequent works. It’s a significant collection, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in Genoa — a city that still houses works by Rubens in churches, museums and private collections to this day — since the eighteenth century. In addition, an extraordinary selection of 80 works rounds out the story of the cultural and artistic context of the Ligurian city in its heyday. During his trip to Italy (1600–1608), Rubens definitely saw and studied Tintoretto and Luca Cambiaso. During his stay, and specifically in Genoa, he met Sofonisba Anguissola, Giovanni Battista Paggi and Bernardo Castello; and collaborated with Jan Wildens and Frans Snyders. All these artists are exhibited.

Fifteen never before exhibited Rubensian works appear in Genoa and ten for the first time in Italy. Two examples of the latter. The first, a self-portrait from 1604–1605, from a private collection. Recently rediscovered, it is an oil study in preparation for a self-portrait that Rubens included in a now lost Mantuan altarpiece. The second, Saint Sebastian Healed by Angels, circa 1615, from a private collection, is now traced to the commission by the famous condottiero, Ambrogio Spinola, thanks to a recent and important documentary discovery. Never exhibited fully, The Resurrected Christ Appearing to His Mother (with a figure from an underlying composition), circa 1612–1616. This painting, from a private collection, depicts the risen Christ standing in front of two kneeling women. Both female figures represent the Mother of Jesus. A recent X-ray revealed the presence of a second female image beneath the painting’s surface, which is compositionally similar, but iconographically different. Both figures are now visible. At this event the studies and comparisons with the well-known Rubensian iconography will be exhibited. Among the new additions are two splendid portraits: Violante Maria Spinola Serra, circa 1607, from Buscot Park (Oxfordshire-The Faringdon Trust) and Geronima Spinola with her granddaughter Maria Giovanna Serra, circa 1605–1606, from Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie. These absolute masterpieces of European Baroque portraiture are both exhibited for the first time with their identities rediscovered.

Museums in Italy and abroad, as well as private collectors, have granted special loans in recognition of a project based on long years of studies and scientific research by the curators, and motivated by the support of a prestigious international honorary scientific committee, composed of the top experts in the field. It’s not only thanks to the research to prepare the exhibition, but also due to the rediscovery of a painting by Rubens that had been lost for two centuries, and which was definitely present in Genoa in the seventeenth century. At this event it is submitted to the scrutiny of international scholars who have never seen it before to prove its attribution. The work itself is a study for the altarpiece, The Miracles of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, still in the Chiesa del Gesù church in Genoa.

These and many other new additions are presented to the public in an exhibition on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the book, Palazzi di Genova, by Pietro Paolo Rubens, printed in Antwerp in 1622. It is an anniversary celebrated in the first room, where two original copies are exhibited, including a rare copy of the first edition, without subsequent additions.

Three books have been published by Electa on the occasion of the exhibition, curated by Anna Orlando: the brochure, also curated by Nils Büttner, presents all the new additions that have come about due to the new research and important updates that resulted from preparing the exhibition; the guide to the exhibition, an easy tool to follow the guided tour; the guide, In Genoa with Rubens, that accompanies the Rubensian tour to discover the masterpieces in the Genoese palaces and in the churches that Rubens definitely visited. For the occasion, Abscondita has published Palazzi di Genova, edited by Anna Orlando. The book contains tables, plans and sections of the buildings selected by Rubens. There’s abundant material to account for not only the complexity, but also the features and comforts of Genoese homes.

The Palazzo Ducale exhibition event has enabled a great project to be created: “Genova per Rubens. A Network“, imagined and curated by Anna Orlando. Indeed, it’s the most important cultural network ever initiated in Genoa centring on a single artist. More than sixty public and private companies are involved in this project dedicated to Rubens and his special relationship with the city. It is an extensive network of collaborations that has made it possible to create introductory talks, cultural events, special openings, side events and further exhibition projects.

“Rubens in Genoa” will be open until 22 January 2023. For information and tickets: palazzoducale.genova.it and www.ticketone.it.

The first retrospective in Italy dedicated to Max Ernst (1891–1976), the German – later American and French – painter, sculptor, poet and art theorist, opens in Milan on 4 October 2022. The exhibition, promoted and produced by the City of Milan – Culture and by Palazzo Reale with Electa, in collaboration with Madeinart, is curated by Martina Mazzotta and Jürgen Pech.

There are over 400 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, photographs, jewellery and illustrated books from museums, foundations and private collections, in Italy and abroad. These include the GAM in Turin, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Museum of Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, the Tate Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Cantini Museum in Marseille, the State Museums and the Arp Foundation in Berlin, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid.

The long period of study and research carried out by the curators has made it possible to include among the loans about eighty paintings, works and documents that had not been exhibited to the public for several decades. 

The breadth of themes and experiments in Ernst’s work spans over seventy years of 20th century history, between Europe and the United States, constantly eluding any definition. Pictor doctus, profound connoisseur and visionary interpreter of the history of art, philosophy, science and alchemy, Max Ernst is presented through this project as a humanist in the neo-Renaissance sense of the word. If André Chastel claimed to find in Ernst a sort of “reincarnation of those Rhenish authors of Bosch-type devilishness”, Marcel Duchamp found “a comprehensive inventory of the different eras of Surrealism”.

On the main floor of the Palazzo Reale visitors can immerse themselves in a fascinating tour that traces the artist’s adventurous creative path, marked by the great historical events of the twentieth century and filled with great loves, as well as illustrious friendships. The tour recounts events from Ernst’s life, grouping them into 4 main periods, in turn divided into 9 themed rooms that reveal interdisciplinary approaches to his art.

It’s a large, idealised library, that of the artist’s, composed of illustrated books, study manuals, photographs, objects and documents, winding through the entire tour of the exhibition, inviting visitors to engage in games to find the references and similarities between the sources of inspiration and the works themselves.

Like a great cabinet of curiosities, and analogous to Max Ernst’s universe, the exhibition and the companion book challenge visitors to discover fascinating games of perception that are at times marvellous, others astonishing, where logic and formal harmony are combined with unfathomable mysteries, where works, techniques and constellations of symbols lead us beyond painting.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a brochure published by Electa, a guide and a new edition, also by Electa, of two fundamental works by Paola Dècina Lombardi on the surrealist movement: Surrealism 1919–1969. Rebellion and Imagination and Women, Freedom, Love. A Surrealism Anthology.

“Max Ernst” will be open from 4/10/2022 until 26/02/2023. For information and tickets: www.maxernstmilano.it, www.electa.it and www.palazzorealemilano.it