Visitart n10 english

5,00 €

a biannual journal on the arts in Florence n.10 autumn 2014/2015 winter

in this issue:

THE 20TH CENTURY IN

FLORENCE Poste Italiane s.p.a. - Spedizione in Abbonamento Postale - D.L. 353/2003 (conv. in L. 27/02/2004 n° 46) art. 1, comma 2, DCB Firenze In caso di mancato recapito inviare a Firenze CMP per la restituzione al mittente previo pagamento resi

Renato Bertelli, Profilo continuo. Dux, 1935, detail, negative. Florence, Pitti Palace, Gallery of Modern Art

and: major exhibitions museums architecture walks hidden treasures city map historic monuments children’s activities people of note

organised with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía of Madrid curated by Eugenio Carmona 20 September 2014-25 January 2015

Guided tours of the exhibition for groups and individual visitors An opportunity to explore in greater depth the themes of the exhibition and Picasso’s major works

Reading room and touch table In the Reading room visitors can leaf through books on the themes and artists in the show, ranging from essays to stories for the very young and great classics. At the available every day on request in several languages end of the exhibition, visitors are invited to reservation required 055 2469600 use a touch table to look through books prenotazioni@palazzostrozzi.org and pads with etchings and drawings by Young people and adults at Palazzo Strozzi Picasso and Torres-García, and to produce • Drawing kit. Sketch your way through the their own digital card, working on the exhibition and creatively explore the works monster theme in Picasso’s work on display For all; available at the Info Point on the Piano Nobile The Passport free admission with exhibition ticket The Passport takes you on a journey in • Let’s talk art. A conversation in the Tuscany to follow the traces of Spanish exhibition encourages an exchange of artists who travelled in Italy in the first half ideas and stimulates a debate in which of the 20th century. Once you have each participant can become a leading collected five or more stamps on your player in the activity Passport, you get a free ticket to the 2 October, 6 November, 4 December 2014, exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi 8 January 2015, from 18; available on request for a minimum of 6 participants reservation required 055 2469600 prenotazioni@palazzostrozzi.org free admission with exhibition ticket

www.palazzostrozzi.org/firenzeintasca

Activities for special audiences • W ith many voices. An activity dedicated to Alzheimer sufferers, their families and their caregivers, run with expert geriatric educators. The project consists of cycles of three meetings

Maria Grazia Messina, Picasso and Cubism: an open question (Museo Novecento, 8 October at 17.30); Desdemona Ventroni, Picasso in Photo Reportage after World War II (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, 21 October at 17); Giandomenico Semeraro, Picasso and the Theatre/Picasso’s Theatre (Teatro della Pergola, 5 November at 18); Susanna Ragionieri, Saltimbanques, Players and Masks in the Italian Commedia dell’arte in Picasso’s day (Museo Marino Marini, 19 November at 17.30); Alfredo Zuppiroli, Picasso: “Science and Charity”. Iconography of the doctor-patient relationship (Lyceum, via degli Alfani 48, 1 December at 18)

Tuesday at 15; participants are under no obligation to attend the full cycle of meetings reservation required 055 3917141 edu@palazzostrozzi.org

Cycle of lectures Five lectures designed to delve deeper into the issues addressed in the exhibition

• Tours for the disabled. An interactive tour designed for people with psychic or Tuesday at the movies cognitive issues and restricted mobility with Palazzo Strozzi invites visitors to observe a selection of A selection of films linked to the exhibition works and to each play an active part in the • L’albero di Guernica, 30 September • Terra e libertà, 7 October ensuing discussion on request 055 3917141 edu@palazzostrozzi.org free admission with exhibition ticket

• Donne sull’orlo di una crisi di nervi, 14 October • Il fascino discreto della borghesia, 21 October • Apri gli occhi, 28 October Cinema Odeon (piazza degli Strozzi) at 20.30 free admission with exhibition ticket

www.palazzostrozzi.org

Activities in and beyond the exhibition Palazzo Strozzi is a buzzing workshop of ideas, exploring new ways to experience art. Its ‘visible listening’ approach considers the museum to be a place for informal learning in which each visitor has the opportunity to implement strategies for boosting his or her personal knowledge. That’s why every exhibition makes plenty of room for different points of view and assigns pride of place to each visitor’s experience.

piazza degli Strozzi

The exhibition presents a broad selection of works of Pablo Picasso, from the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía, that illustrate his influence on the art of the 20th century, setting him alongside such leading Spanish artists as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Juan Gris, María Blanchard and Julio González.

Some ninety works, ranging from painting to sculpture, drawing, engraving and even a film by José Val del Omar, in the period between 1910 and 1963, show together, for the first time, the styles, the aesthetic constants and the plastic principles of the creative force elaborated by Picasso and by the other Spanish artists responsible for the development of modern art, in relation to the social, historical and political context.

The exhibition explores the major themes developed throughout Picasso’s work and allows us to explore his personality, the almost symbiotic bond that existed between his art and his life, between the work that he created and the time in which he lived, while History with a capital ‘H’ frequently made powerful inroads both into his pictures and into his life.

Palazzo Strozzi

P i c a s s o and Spanish Modernity

Exhibition walkthrough References

Reality and Super-reality

The first section explores the fate of Picasso as a legend and an artist: its theme is the metaphor of the creative process, illustrated through one of the versions of The Painter and the Model (1963) and the etchings and drawings that Picasso produced for Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chefd’œuvre inconnu (1931).

The fifth section, which takes its name from a 1928 piece of writing by Dalí, is devoted to the dialectic of artistic creation between reality and super-reality in the specific way in which Spanish art approaches the styles and forms of Surrealism, as embodied not only by Picasso and Dalí but also by such artists as José Solana and Antonio López.

Picasso: variations

Towards Guernica: The Monster and The Tragedy

Experimentation with genres and techniques, another characteristic feature of Picasso’s approach to modernity, is the theme of the second section, which includes exhibits representing each one of the key phases in his artistic career. Among the works on show are Portrait of Dora Maar (1939), the Surrealist photographer who met Picasso in Paris in 1935 and became his lover and the principal female subject of his paintings.

Idea and Form

The third section illustrates Spain’s highly individual and little known contribution to the art of concrete and anylitical form, condensing idea into form, independent of the abstract or figurative register. Important examples are Juan Gris’ Harlequin with a Violin (1919), María Blanchard’s Woman with Guitar (1917) and Pablo Palazuelo’s Clear Weather (1959).

Lyricism. Mark and Surface

The title of the section refers to the lyricism defined in painting and sculpture by marks, surfaces and space. Examples of this trend can be found in Picasso’s Musical Instruments on a Table (1924-1926) or in such sculptural works as Julio González’s Large Venus (1936-1937) and Ángel Ferrant’s Industrious Woman (1948).

These sections consist of an outstanding group of preparatory drawings, engravings and paintings illustrating Picasso’s inspiration and his daily work on the masterpiece that was to become Guernica in May 1937; subdivided into the monstrous and the tragic, the collection of works and sketches allows the visitor to reconstruct the inspiration and cross-contamination of figure and symbol in the artist’s work.

Nature and Culture

Another absorbing theme is the crucial relationship between nature and culture which unfolds in the eighth section, with work by such artists as Alberto Sánchez, Óscar Domínguez, Eduardo Chillida. The search for identity through the relationship between country, landscape and people being a characteristic feature of the Spanish cultural experience.

Towards a Different Modernity

The final section views the ways in which Spanish artists, including Tàpies, handled the change of direction towards a different notion of modernity in the chronological and aesthetic openness of the present, while Miró became the most influential of the Spanish innovators and Picasso turned into a living legend, although his work began to be viewed as a reflection of his entire grandiose career to date.

9

architecture walks

Forms and expressions of 20th-century Florentine architecture The early 20th century The quality of crafted products, the elegance of detail and the conservation of a local stylistic identity, these were the hallmarks of early 20th-century Florentine architecture. The dream of Florence as the Italian capital had by this time faded, and the city faced the new century ‘indifferent’ to the urgent debate on new models of settlement resulting from mass immigration, whether of the working classes (as in Turin and Genoa, new centres of industrialisation) or institutional (Rome and Milan). Nor did Florence seem interested in the expressive possibilities of technological innovation, an area of experimentation in cities with an industrial vocation. The 19th-century lots of expanding neighbourhoods were gradually filled in with rows of terraced houses (the ‘trenini’) or detached houses whose most notable charm was the use of a vast array of decorative elements created in the rooms of the Fine Arts Institute (although not lacking in that typical Tuscan pleasantness and sense of proportion) and constructed with workmanship of undoubted excellence. While the cultural and artistic city participated actively in the avant-garde movements (see the Florentine Futurism of Giovanni Papini, Ardengo Soffici and Aldo Palazzeschi), in architecture it remained narcissistically attached to past glories. The result was the consolidation of Florence’s reputation as a legendary city, more a tourist cliché than a true status, poetically invented from the 19th century onward and enthusiastically diffused among the many foreigners in the city.

What broke this climate of accustomed elegance was the need for distinction of the new upper middle classes. Looking to Europe, they imported Modernism to Florence, the first current to give voice to the aspirations of the new century. With the sole exception of the studio house of borgo Ognissanti (1911, fig. 1), Art Nouveau would find expression only outside the city centre and in the figure of Giovanni Michelazzi, the author of highly commendable results, however tardy.

In the Broggi-Caraceni house, dating from 1910, a sense of fluidity and vitality, no longer confined to the decorative structures (like the Ravazzini house, 19061907, and the two Lampredi houses, 1907-1909), totally invade the volume, making this work one of the most accomplished achievements of early 20thcentury architecture in Italy.

Michelazzi’s work remains an isolated case among the many in Florence at that time. If he left to the city his highly personal Art Nouveau style, Giovanni Paciarelli (Magazzini Pola and Todescan, 1901-1903) and more successfully Adolfo Coppedè (Antonini house, 1906-1907) and Paolo Emilio André (Uzielli house, 1902-1904) experimented their eclecticism here. This was not insensitive to Modernist influences and was certainly distinct from the historicist National Library, eclecticism of Cesare Bazzani (N 1906-1935, fig. 2); Rodolfo Sabatini was also present with his imposing works in Renaissance style (Palazzo delle Poste Centrali, 1908-1914).

Between the two wars Florentine architecture remained traditionalist even after the First World War, and, on closer examination, the current of Renaissance inspiration continued to be felt until the eve of the Second World War. Marcello Piacentini adopted a Quattrocento style for the Cinema-teatro Savoia (1920-1922, later the Cinema Odeon), reproposing the perimeter walls of Palazzo dello Strozzino. But the real innovation took place in the interior, clearly Art Déco in inspiration, starting off a ‘fashion’ that would attract a certain following. Raffaello Brizzi, on the teaching staff and

16

later director of the nascent Scuola Superiore di Architettura (established in 1926, inaugurated in 1931 and directed by Brizzi, soon assisted as a teacher by Raffaello Fagnoni and Giovanni Michelucci), adopted clear references to the Renaissance style up to the later years of the 1920s (see the projects for Montecatini); just as the early production of Fagnoni is also ‘in style’ (buildings for the plan of the Santa Croce area, 1928-1929; Casa del Fascio of Settignano, 1930). This affinity with the 16th-century style was continued throughout the 1930s by Rodolfo Sabatini (see the ‘Ammannatian’ Casa del Mutilato in piazza Brunelleschi, 1931-1936, built in conjunction with the ‘renovation’ of the rotonda of Santa Maria degli Angeli on the basis of Brunelleschi’s project). It was then consolidated by the vast production of professionals like Ugo Giovannozzi (from sober buildings, the Marchi house in piazza Savonarola, 1928-1929, to massive structures, the Ina Assitalia headquarters in piazza della Stazione, 1935-1940).

Stylistic imitation of pre-existing styles in the city’s historic centre and the repeated reproposal of Medieval and Renaissance styles, at most with just a hint of modernism, used for residential buildings in the immediate outskirts (filling in the new sections of the Bellincioni town plan, approved in 1924), if on the one hand crystallised the appearance of the city, on the other they protected it from the excessive theatricality of the Fascist regime, and from the superficial adoption of rationalist features.

A ‘diffidence’ that would soon give way to the vitality and independence of Florentine architecture in the 1930s.

Within the School of Architecture there was a great deal of debate on what exactly was meant by ‘contemporary’. Notwithstanding the emergence of two distinct currents – one more drawn to traditionalism and monumentalism (including Brizzi and in the early days Fagnoni), the other attracted by rationalism (Michelucci, Italo Gamberini, Sarre Guarnieri, Nello Baroni, Gherardo Bosio, then later Aurelio Cetica and Pier Niccolò Berardi) – reaction to the Giovanni Berta city stadium (Pier Luigi Nervi, 1929-1932, fig. 3) was nothing short of unanimous approval, acclaimed as it was in the pages of ‘Architettura’ as symptomatic of the ‘awakening of Italian energies’. Even more remarkable, not merely for the intrinsic, innovative value of the cultural affirmation but also for the harsh reaction of those critics who were against it (contesting the alleged impersonality and ascetic modernity of rationalism and demanding a ‘return to order’) is the fact that the winner of the competition for the building of the Fabbricato viaggiatori of the Santa Maria Novella station (1933-1935, fig. 4) was the Gruppo Toscano, a team of professionals that grew up within the Architecture Faculty (Michelucci, Baroni, Berardi, Gamberini, Guarnieri, Leonardo Lusanna) and won with a project developed from the thesis of Italo Gamberini. The result was the most important example of anti-monumentalistic rational architecture in Tuscany, immediately acclaimed at an international level. The building was absolutely innovative in form and appearance. Care was taken to avoid any clash with the surrounding urban environment, and ‘traditional’ local design components were used in its construction. This particular expression of modernity shaped the profile of a truly Florentine school which would be recognisable at least until the early 1970s.

The building seeks a connection with the surrounding context, employing the same material as the apse of Santa Maria Novella (pietraforte). It stands opposite

Emilia Daniele

PhD and Lecturer, University of Pisa

the Dominican church with an attitude of obsequious respect, with a simple ‘wall’, a typically Tuscan element in terms of both form and character. On the other side of the wall, by contrast, and with the same ‘Tuscan’ reserve, is the station building’s interior rich in polychrome marbles, glass and metal finishings.

Even the Palazzina Reale, despite being closer to the rhetoric of the Fascist regime, was acclaimed as ‘the most interesting and intelligent revival of the linear Florentine spirit since the late 15th century’ (‘Architettura’, 1936), this being due to the extremely essential lines of the design.

The elegant ‘Mediterranean’ rationalism of the Istituto di Scienze Militari Aeronautiche (I.S.M.A.) of the Aeronautica Militare at the Cascine park (Raffaello Fagnoni, 1937-1938, fig. 5), expressed with monumentality, was also highly admired by international critics, as was the Casa della Gioventù Italiana del Littorio in piazza Beccaria (Aurelio Cetica and Fiorenzo De Reggi, 1934-1938, later demolished). The complex of the Manifattura Tabacchi in via delle Cascine (1933-1940), with its interesting recreational club (today’s Teatro Puccini), is more rigid and of uncertain authorship. The Bolognese Angiolo Mazzoni, architect of the Projects and Construction Division of the Italian State Railways, instead brought to Florence a modernity of even broader scope: the complementary works of the Santa Maria Novella station (the ‘Squadra Rialzo’ building, the main controls cabin and central heating plant, 1929-1933, fig. 6) were an expression of his later professional and personal career, a successful blend of metaphysical classicism and Futurist and Constructivist influences.

There was, however, no real middle-class clientèle willing to patronise the new architecture, with the result that private commissions entrusted to young members of the Gruppo Toscano were few in number. Gherardo Bosio designed the clubhouse of the Ugolino Golf Course (1934), demonstrating a conformity with rational architecture devoid of dogmatism although attentive to the shapes and atmosphere of minor rural buildings in Tuscany. Nello Baroni designed the Cinema Rex, later the Apollo, in via Nazionale (1936-1937), among the most interesting buildings constructed in Italy in the 1930s for the formal solutions of the interiors, the unusually large capacity and the studies of acoustics and visibility. Rigorous, though unprovocative, was the rationalism of the Singer company building in via Cittadella designed by Italo Gamberini (1938).

Reconstruction The drama of reconstruction rendered the rhetorical emphasis of Fascist architecture anachronistic and generated a certain impatience toward the ‘homologated’ formulas of Rationalism, now an international style. An ‘anticonformist’ attitude that attracted the attention and approval of international critics: ‘in the first ten years after the Great War Italian architecture was the liveliest, the most creative, the most stimulating in Europe’ (G.E. Kidder Smith, The New Architecture of Europe). Florence had a role of prime importance in this tenacious search for authenticity and an outstanding exponent in Giovanni Michelucci. From the pages of ‘La Nuova Città’, the magazine he founded in December 1945, Michelucci called for a new Humanism in architecture, questioning the validity of urban planning as a tool for the effective prediction of social needs. He favoured the individuality of each single project, to be understood as an organic interaction between architecture and town planning. This position rejected