Secession and Avant-garde - The Art in Italy before the Great War 1905 - 1915

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Secession and Avant-garde
The Art in Italy before the Great War 1905-1915

Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art, 
31 October to 15 February 2015

Curator: Stefania Frezzotti 

Ferdinand Hodler, Sentiment (1901-1902)

For about one year this blog has devoted ample space to the reality of Secessions across Europe and more in general to the artistic movements that in some way refer to the tradition and the rediscovery of medieval art techniques (which had their maximum expression in the Book of Art by Cennino Cennini). For this reason, it seems fair to make an exception to our rule and dedicate a post to the opening of the exhibition devoted to 'Secession and Avant-Garde' (edited by Stefania Frezzotti). The exhibition is being held at the National Gallery of Modern Art (GNAM, from Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) in Rome, from 31 October 2014 to 15 February 2015. 

In general, tourists do not come to Rome to see the GNAM. This blog is also intended as an invitation to explore the Gallery and its splendid permanent collection.

For full details, please visit the GNAM’s website: www.gnam.beniculturali.it/index.php?it/1/home

Below is the text of the press release presenting the exhibition (translated into English by Francesco Mazzaferro). The attached pictures were kindly provided by the Press Office of the National Gallery. 

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With the exhibition Secession and Avant-garde. The art in Italy before the Great War 1905-1915, the National Gallery of Modern Art wants to deepen the knowledge on a period of particularly innovative fervour within the Italian artistic and literary culture, immediately preceding the First World War. A short period - ideologically marked by political and social conflicts and a growing nationalism - during which artists and critics are interrogating themselves on the concepts of modernity and avant-garde. 

While the nineteenth century, the so-called 'long century', was about to die, and with its death the enthusiastic confidence in the progress of the belle époque was also disappearing, a generation of young artists took position against the established formal system of exhibitions (the exhibitions of the Amatori e Cultori - Amateurs and Connoisseurs – in Rome, the Bienniali – Biennials in Venice), challenging the conservative and selective criteria that governed inclusions and exclusions, claiming freedom of expression and independence for alternative exhibition channels. 

As it was already the case in Munich, Berlin and Vienna, a group of Italian young and less young artists chose to join, under the common mark of the Secession, which was both interpreted literally, as separatism, sharp division and antagonism, as well as an event gathering the most innovative forces around modernist concepts. It did not take long before elements of avant-garde penetrated it. 

Aroldo Bonzagni, St. Sebastian

The exhibition of the National Gallery starts off with 1905, the year in which Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni organise in the foyer of the Teatro di Roma the “Exhibition of the Rejected” which, although did not fully succeed in the attempt to act as an effective opposition to the annual exhibitions of the “Amateurs and Connoisseurs”, established the beginnings of that opposition. Through eight thematic areas - which include more than 170 works - the exhibition opens around the century’s beginning in the climate of Unitarian Socialism, of which Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo is a precursor, and which gathers in Rome Giovanni Cena, Duilio Cambellotti and Giacomo Balla, here present with the monochrome portrait of Lev Tolstoy. A group of Italian artists follow, who had a noteworthy participation in the European independent or secessionist exhibitions: Gaetano Previati, admired for his symbolist spirituality at the Salon de la Rose-Croix of Paris and the Internationale Kunstausstellung of Munich; Medardo Rosso, who took part in the great exhibition on impressionism organized by the Vienna Secession in 1903; Giovanni Segantini, present at the Salon du Group of XX in Brussels and at the exhibitions of the Secessions of Munich and Vienna, invited there by the artists of the Klimt's circle itself. 

The needs for a renewal and international openness are polarized between 1908 and 1915 in Venice and Rome, in the manifestations of the Ca' Pesaro and the Roman Secession. In the first rooms one can follow the intertwining of the two events. From the exhibition activities of the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (which are suspended in 1913 because too "subversive" compared to the Venice Biennale), arise Gino Rossi, Tullio Garbari, Ubaldo Oppi, Vittorio Zecchin, Guido Marussig, but especially Arturo Martini and Felice Casorati, who would leave an incisive mark in the development of Italian art of the twenties and thirties of this century. The variety of references of the group at Ca' Pesaro ranges from the Viennese Secession to primitivism, from the landscape painting of northern-European to Gauguin and Synthetism at Point-Aven, but also new art directions, represented by the pre-futurist works of Boccioni, to whom a solo exhibition was dedicated in 1910.

Ivan Meštrović, Warrior with a spear (1911)

The Roman Secession declares from its own name - "International Art Exhibition of the Secession" - the desire to reconnect programmatically to similar movements in the German and Austrian area, while proposing in parallel a stronger connection to the recent European artistic research in an attempt to de-provincialize the Italian culture. In 1913, the room on French art raises a great commotion. Three years after the exhibition at the Lyceum in Florence, where a painting by Vincent Van Gogh had been exhibited for the first time (the Gardener, now at the National Gallery), an exhibition of French art is presented from Impressionism to get until the latest trends, with artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Félix Vallotton, Édouard Vuillard, Kees van Dongen. The Central European area is represented by the symbolism of Franz von Stuck and the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler, who joins in 1900 the Munich and Vienna Secession; in 1914 arrives in Rome the highly expected new Austrian group headed by Gustav Klimt (including Kolo Moser and Egon Schiele). Quite exceptional the presence in Rome of the Russian artists of Мир искусства - Mir Iskusstva (or the “World of Art”, which includes Filipp Andreevič Maljavin  and Igor' Emmannuilovič Grabar'), an artistic group which is the expression of the magazine founded in 1898 in Petersburg by Sergei Diaghilev, and re-established in 1910 by Nikolaj Rerich. 

Even in Rome, as in Venice, different trends are highlighted, with full freedom of expression: from the elegantly sophisticated interpretations of divisionism by Camillo Innocenti, Arturo Noci, Plinio Nomellini, to the plastic novelties of Roberto Melli. Artists from Ca' Pesaro are also welcomed: Mario Cavaglieri, Lorenzo Viani, Zecchin, and the 'rebels' Rossi, Casorati, Martini. In the hardship of war, the foreign presences are eventually reduced in most recent editions, while the young Felice Carena, Pasquarosa Bertoletti, and Armando Spadini establish themselves. 

Umberto Boccioni, Modern Idol (1911)

The disruptive innovation of the Futurists, ambiguously marginalized by the Roman secessions, finds its own seat in the Permanent Futurist Gallery of Giuseppe Sprovieri, which in 1914 hosts European exponents of abstract art-futurism, including the Russians Alexander Archipenko and Aleksandra Exter, connecting the circularity of current trends via that exhibition. The Sprovieri Gallery is a true experimental laboratory, challenging public and critics with the works of Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini and the first Depero. 

Ca' Pesaro and Roman Secession thus represent the poles of a 'moderate' avant-garde, as opposed to the radical avant-garde of Futurism, which aims at influencing the language of art, the psyche of modern individuals, and the political reality in a revolutionary way. The exhibition terminates with the tabula rasa that World War I imposes vis-à-vis each avant-garde aspiration, absorbing its vital energy. The enthusiastic futurist interventionism, the new, ultra-modern iconography of the war in "patriotic demonstrations" by Cangiullo, Marinetti, Balla, contrasts with the poetics of silence and absence, an herald of the upcoming drama, by the first De Chirico. 

The initiative is part of the official program of the commemorations to mark the centenary of the Great War organised by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers - Structure of the Mission for the anniversaries of national interest.

Source: Press Communiqué of the National Gallery of Modern Art. Translation into English by Francesco Mazzaferro