Featuring Carlo Carrà

This exhibition explored the editorial production of the Futurist movement (1909-1944) through manifestos, magazines, posters, parole-in-liberta and books. The Futurists proclaimed a desire to destroy all libraries in 1909 when, ironically, their literary production would have substantially increased the holdings of any such establishment. They also orchestrated a fundamental renovation of the book in graphic form, just as it faced a treat from the introduction of radio and cinema.

This exhibition represented a rare opportunity to see nineteen paintings by Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), spanning his career from 1914, his early Futurist phase, up to 1957, together with fourteen works by his contemporaries. They are selected from the collection of Augusto and Francesca Giovanardi, who shared a passion for mid-century Italian painting, particularly still lifes and landscapes.

Carlo Carrà (1881-1966) is one of the most important Italian artists and writers on art of the first half of the twentieth century. Carrà was one of the founding painters and propagandists of Italian Futurism in 1910, and his early Futurist work, Leaving the Theatre (1910-11) is in our permanent collection. He also painted in the style of the Metaphysical School along with Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi between 1915 and 1919. This exhibition concentrates on Carrà’s drawing, a daily activity and aide-memoire for the artist, which resulted in thousands of works during his lifetime.

In the earliest years of the twentieth century the still life genre underwent something of a renaissance. As artists became increasingly concerned with purely formal, pictorial values, it came to be considered a perfect vehicle for experimentation with new aesthetics, free from any complicating narrative dimensions.

Comprising over 120 works by many of the most prominent Italian artists of the Modernist era, the Estorick Collection opened to the public in January 1998. Described by Sir Nicholas Serota as 'one of the finest collections of early 20th century Italian art anywhere in the world', it was formed in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Eric Estorick (1913-93), an American art-dealer, writer and political scientist, and is the only collection in the United Kingdom dedicated to this turbulent and fascinating period of Italian art.

Over a period of sixty years following the Second World War, Vito Merlini (1923-2007) amassed an extraordinary collection of prints whilst working as a doctor in his Tuscan home town of Peccioli. Following his first acquisition – a lithograph by Ardengo Soffici – the collection grew until by the turn of the century it numbered around 1,000 works, comprising prints by both Italian and international artists from de Chirico to Mirò, Guttuso to Sutherland. Towards the end of his life, 279 works from the collection were presented by Merlini to Peccioli, and it is from this donation that the exhibition was drawn.

This fascinating exhibition presented the findings of a group of specialist art historians, restorers and scientists who examined key works from the Estorick’s permanent collection. Using the most up-to-date methods employed in the analysis of artworks, they shed new light on the different techniques used by a number of painters, and in some cases even revealed the presence of previously unknown images beneath, or on the back of, the Collection’s masterpieces.

The Estorick opened its 20th anniversary year with a major exhibition of works from one of the world’s most important collections of modern Italian art, housed at Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera.

In autumn 2021, the Estorick’s entire collection of modern Italian art was on show throughout the museum’s six galleries in a new exhibition, Estorick Collection Uncut.

An exploration of the relationship between Ukrainian-born American artist Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964) and the masters of Italian modern art.