Press materials Uncannily Real Italian Painting of the 1920s 28 September 2018 – 13 January 2019 Opening: 27 September, 7 p.m. Content 1. Press release 2. Biographies – a selection 3. Wall texts 4. General information 5. Catalogue 6. Press images 7. Fact sheet Museum Folkwang Press Release Uncannily Real – a major special exhibition on Italian painting of the 1920s on display at Museum Folkwang from 28 September. Essen, 27.9.2018 – The exhibition Uncannily Real: Italian Painting of the 1920s presents more than 80 paintings from Realismo Magico. This artistic movement emerged in Italy in the wake of the First World War, parallel to Neue Sachlichkeit in Germany. Outstanding works by key protagonists such as Felice Casorati, Antonio Donghi and Ubaldo Oppi are featured alongside influential paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. This represents the first comprehensive presentation of these works in Germany, allowing visitors to rediscover this strand of Modernism. After the experiences of the First World War, in Europe and beyond, many artists returned to a realistic form of representation, definitively abandoning Expressionism. Picking up on the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà and the rappel à l’ordre (call for a return to order) issued by Parisian Neo-Classicism, the artists cause time to stand still in their paintings. They imbue their realistic depictions with dream-like, uncanny, at times disturbing elements. The paintings depict their subject matter clearly and precisely, while retaining a cryptic quality to their atmospheres and themes. The result is the production of evocative works of outstanding painterly quality, often in dazzling colours. The catalyst for these developments was an interrogation of Quattrocento painting, such as Piero della Francesca or Masaccio, whose detailed, realistic depictions and perspectival drawings provided them with inspiration. The exhibition organises the presentation of the paintings into thematic rooms. The first room juxtaposes the architectural images of Carrà and de Chirico with those of Ubaldo Oppi and the significantly later painting La città deserta by Carlo Sbisà. There is a focus on portraits of women, which are all marked at once by a sense of pride and a mysterious beauty. This is as true of Casorati’s Cynthia as it is of Donghi’s Donna al Caffè. Intimate and familiar, domestic scenes are also a favoured subject of Realismo Magico. They depict children who look like miniature adults, indeed in Felice Casorati’s The Schoolchildren, they almost seem to resemble revenants. In addition to this, there are table scenes conveying atmospheres of sociality, but even more so, of alienation and loneliness. Another exhibition room is dedicated to masquerades. Time and again, the artists address the theme of painterly representation, or more precisely, of revelation and concealment, of the play of illusion, choosing harlequins, clowns and magicians as motifs. The recurring depictions of drapery and textiles suggest a similar line. In addition to nudes that have been drained of virtually all affection, replacing it with a sense of brutality and isolation – as, for example, in the contorted body of Cagnaccio di San Pietro’s spectacular painting Primo denaro – still lifes are a decisive genre for Realismo Magico. These key genres are intimately related to the content of the images, and are also always reflective of the zeitgeist in Italy in the aftermath of the First World War in the 1920s and 1930s. The nine thematic groupings illustrate that Realismo Magico in no way refers to a closed, self- contained group of artists. Nevertheless, for all the diversity of their individual approaches, they are united by a common mood. The concept of “Magischer Realismus”, coined by the art historian Franz Roh in 1925, describes a puzzling atmosphere in which things are held in abeyance: “with ‘magical’ as opposed to ‘mystical’, the aim is to suggest that the mystery does not enter the world being represented, but remains behind it.” When Mussolini came to power in 1922, art began to evolve against the backdrop of a society marked by fascism. It may have been due to the political situation of those years that these paintings, whose ambiguities all too often trigger uneasiness in the viewer, received relatively little attention in recent decades. The exhibition is accompanied by a historical overview of Italy, its artistic groupings and approaches, and by Italian posters from the era and by a film programme curated by film expert Olaf Möller. Peter Gorschlüter: “I’m so pleased that this exhibition provides a glimpse into this era that for so long remained in the shadows of art historical research, enabling a new, comprehensive perspective on the works, which have been gathered together from numerous institutional and private collections. In this respect, the academic symposium that will accompany the exhibition is an important component of our approach to considering this artistic style in a more comprehensive fashion.” Uncannily Real Italian Painting of the 1920s 28 September 2018 – 13 January 2019 This exhibition has been made possible by the support of the NATIONAL-BANK AG and the Kulturstiftung Essen. Admission fees: € 8 / € 5 Catalogue published by Hirmer: retail price € 39.90 / museum price: € 32 Press enquiries Anna Littmann, T +49 201 8845 160, [email protected] Press images can be downloaded at www.museum-folkwang.de Biographies Edita Broglio (1886 Smiltene – 1977 Rome) In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the family of Edita Walterowna von zur Mühlen were forced to flee Russia, and after a number of stops along the way, took up residence in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad), where Walterowna completed her studies at the academy of the arts. She spent the next two years continuing her studies independently in Paris, learning from the originals at the Louvre and engaging in dialogues with contemporary avant-garde artists, before settling in Rome in 1912. In 1913 and 1914, she exhibited her works at the Secessione Romana. In 1917, she met Mario Broglio, whom she married in 1927. She was involved in founding and editing the periodical Valori Plastici, which ran from 1918 to 1921. Her artworks became increasingly influenced by Italian masters of the early Renaissance. Together with the milieu of visual artists involved in the publication, in 1921 she exhibited seven works at the exhibition Primaverile Fiorentina. In 1930, the couple moved to Paris, where they continued to work together closely, both artistically and editorially. Cagnaccio di San Pietro (1897 Desenzano del Garda – 1946 Venice) Natalino Bentivoglio Scarpa grew up in the village of San Pietro on the island of Pellestrina, on the edge of the Venetian Lagoon. As an expression of his connection to his homeland, the name of this village then became part of his pseudonym. After studying for a year at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, he continued his training independently. His early work was heavily influenced by Futurism, and from the 1920s, his painting evolved towards a formal rigour and spatial density. He used objects and situations that characterised everyday life in Venice as the subject matter of his paintings. 1923 saw the beginning of prolific exhibiting: he twice had works in Ca’ Pesaro, and the following year, Cagnaccio made his debut at the Venice Biennale. His 1928 submission After the Orgy, which together with Zoology and Money First formed part of a trilogy, triggered a scandal. His first solo exhibition ensured in 1929, in the Botteghe d’Arte in Venice. In the 1930s and ’40s, he participated in multiple Venice Biennales and in the Terza Quadriennale Romana. He died in 1946 at the age of 49 after a prolonged illness. Two years later, a retrospective was dedicated to his work at the Biennale. Carlo Carrà (1881 Quargnento – 1966 Milan) Carrà moved to Milan in 1895 as an assistant painter, and moved to Paris in 1899, where he used his weekends to continue his education in museums and galleries. In 1906 he enrolled in the Accademia di Brera. He quickly became a fixture in artist circles, becoming involved in the Futurist movement, and co-signing the first Futurist Manifesto in 1909 alongside Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and Luigi Russolo. In 1912, he accepted Severini’s invitation to show work in the exhibition Les Peintres Futuristes Italiens at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. Following the First World War, his focus shifted increasingly to the Italian painting of the Quattrocento. Together with Giorgio de Chirico and Filippo de Pisis, whom he met in a military hospital in Ferrara, he developed a new formal language. He began to focus increasingly on his second profession as a writer, and through the publication of Pittura metafisica (1919), he provided the theoretical underpinnings of this movement. In 1922, Carlo Carrà participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time, and in 1924, his monograph on Giotto was published in the periodical Valori Plastici. In 1926, he accepted Margherita Sarfatti’s invitation to take part in the Mostra del Novecento Italiano. In 1941, he became a professor at the Accademia di Brera. Four years before his death, a retrospective was dedicated to his oeuvre at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. Giorgio de Chirico (1888 Volos – 1978 Rome) Born in Greece, de Chirico began studying painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich in 1906 and graduated in 1909. Inspired by local painting and philosophical writing – in particular Weininger, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – his early work addressed classical and mythological themes. In 1912 and 1913, his works were shown for the first time at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. It was during these years that he developed key elements of his painting, such as arcade architecture, manikins and a pronounced use of one- point perspective, which formed the foundations of his pittura metafisica.