Zoom "The Invention of the Modern"

The art works from the 19th and early 20th centuries
on show in the renaissance Palazzo delle Albere in Trento are a prologue that
weaves together past and present in the current collection of the Mart. Until
2010, many large exhibitions were held in the large frescoed rooms, and stable
locations were found for paintings and sculptures, some of which came from
important collections and donations, including works by Hayez, Bonazza,
Disertori, Moggioli and Vallorz.

This basic heritage forms
the root of a direction that introduces "The Invention
of the Modern" to the narrative.

The painting by Francesco Hayez, Venere che scherza con due colombe (1830), is one of the best known masterpieces of the Mart Collections.
In his portrait of the dancer Carlotta Chabert in the mythological guise of Venus, the artist distanced himself from the classical model, which nevertheless constitutes the main reference. The pose, in fact, echoes that of the Venus Callipyge, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic statue in the Archaeological Museum in Naples.

The body painted by Hayez is that of a flesh-and-blood woman and he faithfully portrays its imperfections. The carnal sensuality of this female nude scandalized the artist’s contemporaries and overshadowed the presence of elements still linked to the neoclassical tradition, like the mock scenery that forms the setting and the red ribbon carried by the doves, symbol of the ties of love.

The Mart Collections include numerous pieces by Moggioli, many of which donated by the artist’s heirs to the Collection of Art belonging to the Province of Trento.

In the early 20th century, Moggioli studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, exhibiting at the Biennale and at the shows of the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Ca’ Pesaro. Here he came into contact with artists with first-hand knowledge of the French avant-garde, such as Gino Rossi, and the naturalism of his early style evolved into a symbolism influenced by Gauguin’s work and by the Pont-Aven School.

From 1911, he resided on the island of Burano, where he painted the landscapes of the Venetian lagoon, with a palette dominated by light blue shades and suspended atmospheres.

The first section of the exhibition "The Invention of the Modern" opens with some figures painted in
the divisionist style by Balla, Boccioni, and Severini. An investigation of light distinguishes these
works, laying the foundations for a more
accentuated dynamism that, within a few years, would be at the heart of
Futurist poetics.

After being protagonists of Futurism, some artists like Carrà embarked on a personal dialogue with the art of the 14th
and 15th centuries.

In the 1920s many others, from Casorati to Martini, from de Chirico
to Sironi, looked back to the old masters in an effort to restore to their
figures a solidity and a constructive synthesis that would mark the search for
a modern classicism.

In the early years of the 20th century Boccioni was in Rome: here he developed a friendship with Gino Severini, with whom he shared a profound sense of dissatisfaction with academic rules. This common desire for renewal led them to make regular visits to the studio of Giacomo Balla, who conveyed his own particular interpretation of Divisionist painting to them.

Nudo di spalle is not only one of the many real life portraits that have Cecilia Forlani, Boccioni’s mother, as their protagonist, but it is above all an exercise on the theme of backlighting, a lighting effect of which the artist was particularly fond.

This canvas shows very clearly the signs of Balla’s influence in the spreading of colour using thin, bright filaments of pure colour, matched according to the Divisionist principle of the decomposition of colours.

In the early 1910s the
Metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico, with its poetics of formal rarefaction,
visionary perception of reality and disconcerting relationship between places
and things, anticipated the search for a new art but one with its roots in the
past. Classical images – plaster casts or busts of ancient statues – appeared
alongside objects from modern life and his urban landscapes were suspended in a
dimension lacking any clear spatial and temporal location, dominated by a
multitude of perspective constructions and peopled by faceless mannequins with
no identity.

De Chirico created his first metaphysical paintings in the 1910s, inspired by the geometry of Renaissance piazzas. His famous Piazze d’Italia are nourished by memories of real spaces reinterpreted in an oneiric key. In 1913, the poet Apollinaire described the artist’s paintings as “strangely metaphysical”: works that show us a meta-reality that take us by surprise, revealing unsettling presences and enigmatic content much like a dream.

A signatory to the Manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo in 1915, Fortunato Depero applied a new plastic synthesis to forms, a decomposition of surfaces with clear contours, as though they were cut out of bright coloured cloth (a technique that he actually used in the production of applied art starting from the founding of his Casa d'Arte in Rovereto in 1919).

The interpretation of movement is rather unique: he prefers a decomposition of the figure into planes defined by flat colours, such as the fan of segments and disks that synthesise the beating of the wings of a bird in movement, to the fluid and broken brushstrokes of the early Futurism.