Most of it comes from a bequest from Emilio and Maria Jesi and most of it has never been shown outside of Italy before. On donating these works to the Brera in 1976 the collectors dedicated it "to the artists and art lovers of yesterday, today and tomorrow". A demographic most of us would surely find ourselves in.
But is much of the art on show in The Enchanted Room:Modern Works from the Pinacoteca di Brera worth seeing, worth loving? I'd have to give it a resounding 'si'.
Carlo Carra - Rhythms of Objects (1911)
The Piedmontese artist Carlo Carra is one whose works can be seen in the Estorick's permanent collection and if he later developed both more futurist and metaphysical styles of painting then 1911's Rhythms of Objects clearly show the results of his trip to Paris earlier that year with Umberto Boccioni where he was introduced to the cubism of Braque and Picasso.
The work seems to sit on the cusp of both cubism and futurism, mixing the studied stillness of the former with the energetic movement of the latter to produce an effect that had me thinking of stained glass. Carra's Tuscan contemporary Severini had already been a resident of Paris for a lustrum and it was he who introduced Carra and Boccioni to the developing French styles. Perhaps because he'd been away from Italy, Severini's own work seems to be in a more traditionally cubist vein.
Ardengo Soffici, another Tuscan artist, had also been resident in Paris during the 1900s and even though he'd been back in Italy for seven years by the time he painted Watermelon and Liquers, again, you can see the huge debt he owes to the Paris art scene in which he'd been mixing.
Gino Severini - Le Nord-Sud (1912)
Ardengo Soffici - Watermelon and Liqueurs (1914)
Ottone Rosai - Still Life:The Carpenter's Bench (1914)
Ottone Rosai was a new name to me. Closely associated with Ardengo Soffici, as you can see in The Carpenter's Bench. It's a pleasant, if unremarkable, example of cubist painting though highly atypical of the artist who tended to see himself more in the grand tradition of Honore Daumier, Gustave Courbet, and Paul Cezanne.
If that makes it sound like Rosai was an artist whose name isn't well known because he lived in the shadows of greater artists then a quick Google image search should prove that unfair on him. But it's certainly not an accusation you could level at metaphysical maestro Giorgio de Chirico. His paintings of rubber gloves, empty plazas, long shadows, and strange statues are amongst my favourite things in all art. So it was a pity that his sole contribution to this exhibition was the rather staid, and very disappointing, Le printemps de l'ingenieur. It's got some of the main motifs of his style, skewed perspectives, unusual architecture, etc;, but they've yet to be fully realised. They soon would be and this interesting show would've been a far greater one with just a couple of examples of what de Chirico did next.
Giorgio de Chirico - Le printemps de l'ingenieur (The Engineer's Springtime) (1914)
Carlo Carra - The Metaphysical Muse (1917)
The pittura metafiscia at its pomp is, however, represented by a couple more Carlo Carra pieces. Six years on from Rhythms of Objects Carra's art had changed pretty drastically as, with de Chirico, he sought to create enigmatic and dreamlike paintings that affected us in ways we'd not be able to fully understand. These metaphysical paintings predated the most famous of the surrealist artists by about a decade and its easy to see how the likes of Salvador Dali and Max Ernst could've found inspiration in these faceless mannequins, geometrical shapes, maps, and, that old surrealist favourite, fish!
It's a world away from Umberto Boccioni's divisionist self-portrait of just nine years earlier, yet both these artists were key figures in the futurist scene. Boccioni's work seems to come more from the school of Van Gogh, or perhaps from the pointillism of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, but the industrial buildings in the background, we're gently reminded, suggest that he'd already developed an interest in celebrating modernity and the industrial city. Key themes, along with speed, violence, youth, and war for the futurists he would soon be one of.
Umberto Boccioni - Self-Portrait (1908)
Carlo Carra - The Enchanted Room (1917)
Umberto Boccioni - Self-Portrait (1908)
Osvaldo Licini - Equilibrium (1934)
Osvaldo Licini's Equilibrium stands out for a couple of reasons. It's one of the most recent pieces in the show (just 84 years old!) and it's certainly the most purely abstract. Again, Licini was a new name to me. Turns out he'd abandoned figurative painting in 1930 and was now exploring his belief that "geometry can become feeling". I think he's done it rather well. His work would sit rather well alongside that of Ben Nicholson or even Theo van Doesburg. Though it seems likely that Mondrian would baulk at such flashy embellishments as diagonal lines!
Born in Sardinia, Mario Sironi spent his childhood in Rome and after a trip to Germany, brought an expressionist aesthetic with him into the futurist fold. The Truck was painted before his later support, and his provision of decorative works, for Mussolini's fascist regime, and it's easy, at first, to see it as quite the opposite, a rejection of totalitarianism in any form. When you realise it's anything but it's harder to appreciate it. Post-war Sironi's artistic reputation suffered as a result of his overwhelming support for Il Duce and if that's tough on him then tough shit, all you fascists bound to lose.
Anyway, The Lamp's pretty crap even if I can't help holding on to a grudging admiration of The Truck and an even bigger one for the muted muddy Urban Landscape with Chimney.
Mario Sironi - The Truck (1914-15)
Mario Sironi - The Lamp (1919)
Mario Sironi - Urban Landscape with Truck (1919-20)
Mario Sironi - Urban Landscape with Chimney (1930)
Amedeo Modigliani - Portrait of Maise Kisling (1915)
Amedeo Modigliani tried to enlist in the Italian Army during World War I (which was ok, as they were on the right side then) but was refused due to his ill health. He always seemed more a lover than a fighter though. He was all about the love, man. Well, love and multiple terrible addictions and illnesses (he died of tuberculosis in Paris aged just thirty-five). He's certainly the biggest name of any of the artists on show in this exhibition and it was quite a surprise to see a couple of his trademark elongated, or in someway squashed, heads there.
Head of a Young Woman is said to (probably) portray the English writer Beatrice Hastings who had a tempestuous love affair (do artists ever have love affairs that aren't tempestuous? are any love affairs not tempestuous?) with Modigliani. She lived with him in Montparnasse, was noted for her accounts of bohemian life, and converted to theosophy. Her attempts to defend Helena Blavatsky from charges of fraud and plagiarism has seen her get a bad rep within the skeptics community. In Modigliani's portrait she doesn't look too fussed. Inscrutable and fiery at the same time. The fire burns within. Or maybe on her collar.
Amedeo Modigliani - Head of a Young Woman (1915)
Gino Severini - Large Still Life with Pumpkin (1917)
Massimo Campigli's two works on show are in stark contrast to the industrial grime of Sironi or the bold abstractions of Licini. My friend (and purveyor of Burgess Hill radio's fantastic Sunday night show Out of Limits) Dan asked me why one of the guitarists in Women with Guitar was naked and the other clothed. It wasn't a question I could answer. Perhaps it was some sort of reference to Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe some sixty-four years earlier. Perhaps Campigli just liked naked women. Who knows.
Whilst raising obvious questions about the male gaze, it is a rather lovely picture and seems to have something of early Picasso, Fernand Leger, or even Tampara de Lempicka about it. The Garden is equally splendid and seems as if it could've come from an ancient Etruscan or Greek vase or even a cave painting.
Massimo Campigli - Women with Guitar (1927)
Massimo Campigli - The Garden (1936)
Mario Mafai - Butchered Ox (1930)
Mario Mafai founded, with his wife Antonietta Raphael, the Scuola Romana, a group that, unlike many other art movements of the time, seemed to be founded on friendships (or marriages one assumes) than manifestos. As such it's a surprise to see something so fleshy and blood soaked as a Butchered Ox being made subject matter. There's something of the Renaissance religious painting, a hint at the body of Christ, a flayed Marsyas, but it also predates the celebration, or consideration, of flesh itself that we later see in the work of Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville.
Ardengo Soffici - Santa Cristina (1908)
After all the war, the loving, the death, the sex, and the pushing of boundaries the exhibition fades to grey with a collection of still lifes and landscapes from Giorgio Morandi. Or does it? Morandi's paintings may be still but they're anything but dull. Like William Blake seeing the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, it seems Morandi could see eternity in a loose grouping of vases, bottles, and pots.
According to the photohistorian Lamberto Vitali, Morandi's works are "populated not by things but by the ghosts of things" and that seems a pretty apt description. These ordinary household items could be ciphers, they could (as in the work of artists as varied as Paul Nash and Hilma af Klint) represent something more than what they are. But then they could, equally, just be themselves. There's a quiet, contemplative, certainty about Morandi's work that makes it oddly compelling. Like Cezanne or Monet he became fascinated with subtle variations in hue, tone, and arrangement and like them, too, he beavered away studiously, seemingly utterly sure that what he was on to was something worth sticking with.
It turned it out was. In that respect it was much like the decision of the benefactors of Eric and Salome Estorick's collection to open a permanent gallery in London dedicated to modern Italian art in 1998. Sometimes, if an idea's good it's best to stick at it until everyone else comes round. Why else would I write this blog? ;-)
Giorgio Morandi - Landscape (1916)
Giorgio Morandi - Still Life (1929)
Giorgio Morandi - Still Life (1929)
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