Museo del Novecento

Museum del Novecento in Milan, Italy is one of the first and most representative museums of modern art in the world. There you can find many exhibits related to classical art and restored art exhibits. In this article I gonna talk about Lucio Fontana and his art works about cutting canvases

The 20th Century Museum (Museo del Novecento) is located in Milan, in Lombardy in northern Italy, in the Palazzo dell'Arengario. The building began to be built in 1937 during the era of Benito Mussolini. The palace was designed by architects Portaluppi, Magistretti, Muzio and Griffini. In 1999, there was talk of creating a museum with a collection of modern works of art. To do this, they decided to restore the Arengario Palace in order to adapt the interior of the building to the general theme of the modern exhibition. Only the famous spiral staircase, along which you climb inside the glass tower, was left untouched. The Novecento Museum opened on December 6, 2010. It contains about 400 works of Italian art of the twentieth century, including paintings, sculptures and spatial installations. In the museum you can see both the permanent exhibition and temporary exhibitions in the “Focus” hall. One of the most famous and sensational works of the museum: “Composition” by Kandinsky, “Shit of the artist” by Manzoni, “Prodigal son” by Kiriko, “Nude” by Picasso, “Girl running on the balcony” by Balla, “Still life with a mannequin” by Morandi, “Figure” Sironi and others.

The Novecento Museum is divided into thematic rooms, which can be used to trace the chronology of the development of contemporary art. It works like this - the higher you go up, the newer and more modern the work is exhibited. The first floor is dedicated to international avant-garde artists. Here are the works of Picasso, Kandinsky, Jaker, Matisse, Lage. Also here are the works of expressionists of the 40s and the works of Italian artists of the current Arte Povera of the 60s.

The second floor is dedicated to the futurists. Here is a rich collection of works by artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carra, Ardengo Sofiti, Mario Sironi, Achilles Funni and Gino Severini. The museum also has separate halls representing artists Giorgio de Chirico, Morandi and Lucio Fontana, whose works of art are very significant for Milan. His spatial work “Structure in Neon”, visible even from the street, was presented at the Triennial in 1951. The second work of the Fountain "Plafond" was created for the hotel "Bay" on the island of Elba. The third and fourth floors will present you the work of Burri, Kunellis, "Group T", Merz and other creators.

The best part of the museum is on the 3rd floor in a Lucio Fontana part. Fontana was born in 1899 in a creative family: his father had a workshop where monumental monuments were erected on the graves. At the age of 10, Lucio became a student there. Despite his fame as an artist, he is a sculptor by education: in 1927, he entered the Brera Academy in Milan and became interested in cubism. First, the artist made an incision or hole on the canvas with a tool, and then with his hands he gave the hole the desired shape. Dissecting the picture, he sought to make it three- dimensional: the volume should have created shadows from the edge of the section. To create the effect of depth, behind the Fontana glued black fabric to the canvas. So the feeling of emptiness and space turned out.

In the late 40s, Fontana came up with spatial installations, most of which were destroyed. These were corridors and rooms lit by neon tubes, where viewers could enter and experience extraordinary sensations, as if plunging into unreal space. They were first shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1966 and at an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1967. Almost immediately after it, the installations were destroyed, because at that time no one suspected that they might have any value.