Palazzo Franchetti in Venice hosts the exhibition The Nineteenth Century at Palazzo Franchetti until February 16, 2020. An exhibition itinerary among the 20th century masters: from Giorgio de Chirico to Giorgio Morandi, from Giacomo Balla to René Magritte, from Paul Klee to Franz Kline, from Joan Mirò to Leoncillo. The exhibition intends to represent an opportunity to question the future of art through works by the great protagonists of the twentieth century. Those on display are rarely seen works. Furthermore, we will hear the words of Giorgio Morandi in an interview with The Voice of America in 1957: «the possible educational task of the figurative arts» is «particularly in the present time, that of communicating the images and feelings that the visible world arouses in us».
It then reflects on speed, movement and technology with the works of Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini: “Futurist painting in destroying immobility in everything” is “transported into the impressive chaos of universal dynamic action”.
The colors of the canvases resonate in Joan Mirò's “immediate irruption of the infinite into the finite”, in contrast with the calm art of Paul Klee, especially in Die Rolle of 1930, a painting created during one of the last years of teaching at the Bauhaus.
One wonders what the purpose of future painting will be. Giorgio de Chirico, like a seer, states that “it will be exactly the same as that of poetry, music and philosophy: to create sensations unknown in the past; strip the art of the common and the accepted, from any subject in favor of an aesthetic synthesis: completely suppress man as a guide or as a means of expressing symbols, sensations, thoughts, free painting once and for all from anthropomorphism that suffocates the sculpture; see everything, even man, in his quality of everything”.
We continue with Surrealism: René Magritte's iconic masterpieces reveal how ‘the mystery in question” is “unanswered by definition”. Abstract Expressionism, Franz Kline, the Informal; Leoncillo stated that “volumes and drawings are not to be sought. I don't want to create a void here and fullness there, but here I need to sink my fingers and remove clay and stick it there. And then here comes a void and there fullness but they come, I don't look for them as such”.
The exhibition itinerary ends with the great revolution of the Sixties, Pop Art, and Andy Warhol who declares “аll the paintings must have the same dimensions and the same colors, so that they are interchangeable, and no one thinks they have a better picture. Or worse. And if one is a masterpiece, they all are. And then, even if the subject is different, the same picture is always painted”.
In the garden overlooking the Grand Canal are placed the totems of Roberto Sebastian Matta.