In the twentieth century. From Modigliani to Schiele, from De Chirico to Licini

Where and when

From

12July 2019

17October 2019

Museo Novecento

First Floor

The drawings come from the museum’s collection of graphic works, which consists of approximately 13,000 sheets including drawings, prints and engravings by artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Florentine selection intended to put the two museums in dialogue, starting with the presence in the Museo Novecento in Florence of the collection of Alberto Della Ragione and tracing in the graphic collections of the National Gallery the drawings of the same artists collected by the engineer, such as Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo De Pisis, Renato Guttuso, Osvaldo Licini, Mario Mafai, Giorgio Morandi, Enrico Prampolini and Mario Sironi.

Exhibition Hours

Summer Hours

Monday – Sunday

11:00 am

–

8:00 pm

Thursday

Appointment with a new major exhibition dedicated to drawing in the rooms on the first floor of the Museo Novecento. It is entitled “In the twentieth century. From Modigliani to Schiele from De Chirico to Licini” the exhibition curated by Saretto Cincinelli and Stefano Marson and made possible thanks to Leofrance, which features a group of 42 drawings by Italian and foreign artists of the twentieth century, all owned by the National Gallery of modern and contemporary art of Rome.

Thus, four drawings by Telemaco Signorini – among which the beautiful The painter’s studio -, chosen from a large nucleus owned by the National Gallery, want to remember the initial passion of the engineer for the Macchiaioli painters, with the purchase of works by Signorini himself, by Giovanni Fattori and Silvestro Lega, which were then resold. Or, three precious drawings by Amedeo Modigliani chosen to recall the famous self-portrait of 1919 today in Sao Paulo in Brazil, owned by the collector for many years and then also sold, or finally a beautiful drawing by Oskar Kokoschka, which he remembers as Alberto Della Ragione was also initially interested in works by this artist and German Expressionism.

Crediti Leonardo Morfini.

From Kokoschka‘s drawing, the selection has expanded to include a rare and precious nucleus of drawings by expressionist artists, such as Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, George Grosz and Ludwig Kirchner. Of these last two artists there are some drawings which, together with that of Kokoschka, were requisitioned by the Nazis in important German museums to be exhibited at the famous Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich in 1937, then repurchased and saved by the painter Emanuel Fohn and finally donated by his wife in 1967 to the National Gallery, at the request of Palma Bucarelli, then director of the museum. It should be emphasized that Sofie Fohn and Palma Bucarelli met two years earlier in Florence, on the occasion of the historic exhibition on Expressionism set up at Palazzo Strozzi for the XXVII edition of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, dedicated that year by Roman Vlad to Expressionist music and theater.

The exhibition is also an opportunity to remember that Alberto Della Ragione has donated works not only to Florence but also to the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, or to remember that some of those present in his collections have had a passage in the collection of the engineer, such as the Portrait of Ungaretti by Scipione or the famous Crucifixion by Renato Guttuso, bought from Alberto Della Ragione on the occasion of the 4th Bergamo Prize, then returned to the artist and later donated by him to the National Gallery.

Crediti Leonardo Morfini.

Finally, the presence of a drawing by Gustav Klimt is linked to the decisive knowledge of the Viennese artist’s works by Arturo Martini and Felice Casorati, two of Alberto Della Ragione’s most loved artists, who were able to draw inspiration from the master’s work in occasion of the 1910 Venice Biennale.