Vittorio Sella was born in 1859 in Biella, about 50 miles north-east of Turin in the foothills of the Italian Alps, not far from the peaks of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa. His father had written the first Italian language treatise on photography in 1856 and his uncle Quintino Sella, a distinguished statesman and keen Alpinist, founded the Italian Alpine Club in 1863.
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.
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.
When Futurism was founded in 1909, its hostility towards the institution of the Catholic Church was pronounced, and accompanied by a rejection of Christian concepts of morality. Despite this, the publication of a 'Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art' in 1931 inspired a flowering of religious painting that constitutes perhaps one of the most unexpected episodes in the history of the movement.
Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. His enduring experiments with space are landmarks in the history of abstract art and led many artists, including Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, to consider him to be the father of contemporary art. His work can be seen as prefiguring much of the conceptual art being created today.
After founding Futurism in 1909, F.T. Marinetti’s ambition was to establish an international movement that would develop his own group’s activities, achievements and interests. Futurist ideas quickly became familiar to Russian artists through translations of manifestos and newspaper articles, yet Marinetti’s visit to the country in 1914 provoked mixed responses. While many artists admired his revolutionary zeal others resented what they perceived to be Marinetti’s cultural imperialism.
This exhibition displayed thirty-six large scale original designs by little-known artists from the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London. The coloured drawings were translated into black and white postcards for mass reproduction throughout Italy. Postcards first appeared in Austria from 1869 and became increasingly popular across Europe and America, reaching a ‘golden age’ in the first decade of the 20th century.
This exhibition was the first major retrospective to be devoted to that most enigmatic of Futurists, Luigi Russolo (1885-1947). A signatory of the ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Painters’ in 1910, Russolo is perhaps best known as a pioneering musician, his theory of the ‘art of noises’ a landmark in the history of avant-garde music. By contrast, Russolo’s pictorial work remains little-known, particularly that of his post-Futurist phase.
Abstraction first emerged in Italian art around 1910, when painters belonging to the Futurist school began developing their studies of light and motion in bold new directions, depicting ‘the essential force lines of speed’ as brightly-coloured arcs and thrusting, jagged forms.
Giorgio Morandi is one of the most famous and popular Italian painters of the twentieth century, best known for his contemplative still life paintings of familiar objects such as bottles, vases, jugs and boxes, painted in subtle combinations of colour and a narrow range of tones. Yet his work also contains radical ideas about the nature of picture-making and artistic practice that have made it consistently relevant to subsequent generations of artists.