A New Museum of 20th-Century Italian Art - A Construction Mogul Gives Back (a little or a lot?)

A portrait of the Cerasis by Stefano Di Stasio (2016),
against the backdrop of one of the artworks in their
collection, Ballo sul fiume ["Dance along the river"] (1935-36) 

by Giuseppe Capogrossi.

The display of 20th-century Italian art took a giant leap forward this year with the opening of a new private museum in Rome, Palazzo Merulana.

The Palazzo is a refurbished - in essence, reconstructed - 1929 building housing the department of public hygiene. It holds 90 works collected by the construction mogul, Claudio Cerasi and his wife, Elena.

The Department of Hygiene as it looked when it opened in
1929.  You could get vaccinations there.

The Cerasis have performed a trifecta: they saved a worthy building, they opened magnificent artworks to the public, and they breathed life into a somewhat run-down neighborhood.

Whether all that public value is a net public benefit or not, more later.

Giacomo Balla's "Primo Carnero, Campione
del Mondo ("Champion of the World"),
oil on panel with mesh, 1933.

The building and the art work are worth a visit, and--by Rome standards--it's not expensive!  Only Euro 5 for a regular ticket, Euro 4 for concessions (like youth and teachers and you don't have to be an EU citizen to get those concessions) -- another Euro 1 discount through September 30, btw.

The art work is beautifully and creatively displayed.  We're talking De Chirico, Balla, Sironi, Pirandello, Severini, Cambellotti, among the many artists represented. There are a few 21st-century works as well. 

 I'm not sure of the date of this Matteo Pugliese (b. 1969) sculpture (left), which could be 20th or 21st century -  "La Spinta" - "The Push."  It's interestingly located in the outdoor terrace where one can have lunch or coffee - the first floor of the Palazzo, which houses most of the sculptures, is free. 

All Ontani's works are self-
reflective and look like him.

There's also a bust of Dante by Luigi Ontani, about whom we've written.

Arturo Martini's "Victoria on her
Way" (Vittoria in cammino), 1932,
note the fasci.

The building as it looked before the Cerasis
started to reconstruct it (more photos at the
end of this post).

On the fourth floor, which is primarily meeting space, there are photos of the building when it opened, when it fell into ruin, and when it was reconstructed.  All fascinating.  I read that the building was bombed, and that would explain the 1/3 that was missing.  But I also read it was slated for demolition in the 1950s and the demolition was halted - and that is the explanation.  What seems clear is that it was left in a partly demolished state for some 50 years.  So indeed its reclamation is astounding.

Part of the sculpture court and cafe' today.

Same area as photo above left, under construction.

I mentioned above the via Merulana neighborhood has been a little run-down.  It was clearly an upper-class neighborhood when built up in the early 20th century.  It also has some fame, partly as a result of an almost unreadable but significant novel by Carlo Emilio Gadda, "That Awful Mess on Merulana Street."  Palazzo Merulana clearly adds beauty to the street.  The Palazzo also is near Piazza Vittorio, now the locus of many immigrants in Rome (see our review of the documentary by that name), and seen by some as degraded.  Again, Palazzo Merulana's luster helps that area, too.

This is an excellent museum from which to get a perspective on 20th-century Rome - the building, the collection, the neighborhood.  

The question I raised at the top about net value revolves around the issue of a private museum generally. What did the Cerasis get in government support and tax breaks for this project?  Do the artworks remain available to the public even after their deaths? Would the Cerasis have contributed more to the public good by donating their money and their collection to a public museum?  In fact, the Cerasi construction company got the contract to build the national contemporary gallery, MAXXI.  Designed in concrete by Zaha Hadid, that must have been a heckuva contract. I wrote about this issue for theAmerican/inItalia's law column in August; here's the link.

Palazzo Merulana today

Palazzo Merulana is open 2-8 p.m. Monday, Wednesday through Friday, and 10 a.m. - 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Last entrance 9 p.m. Closed Tuesday. Cafe' open 8:30 a.m. - 9 p.m. every day except Tuesday. Because it's open Mondays and not Tuesdays, this is an option for a Monday when most museums are closed. Website in Italian and English. Easily reachable from the Manzoni Metro stop on the A Line.  Also walkable from Piazza Vittorio and the Coliseum and their Metro stops on the A and B lines respectively.

Dianne

A modernist gem in Vittoria: the Chiesa di Cristo Re

The area of Rome we're living in is called "della Vittoria," and it begins about a mile north of the Vatican.  It was all developed after 1900.  On the whole, it lacks exceptional buildings, although there are plenty of attractive ones built in the 1920s--large apartment buildings with enticing interior courtyards.

On viale Mazzini

The bronze above the door is by one of the
more famous 20th century Italian sculptors,
Arturo Martini

We've walked the area before, and never paid much attention to the Chiesa di Cristo Re (Church of Christ the King), with its modernist facade of brick.  The other day, having read in our architectural guide that the church was designed by Marcello Piacentini, surely the most famous architect of the Fascist era (and sometimes called "Mussolini's architect"), we made our way to nearby viale Mazzini, where the church stands.  The exterior is in rows of Roman hand-made brick.

And there, on the side of one of the front doors, proof of Piancentini's role, though why the spelling is Marcelli remains a mystery (perhaps an attempt to Latin-ize his name- to go with "Opus" = "work" in Latin).












Inside, the chiesa is rigorously symmetrical, with powerful streamlined features--the narrow, curved balcony in the photo below, and other curved features-- that strike us as unusual, even for the early 1930s, when the building was constructed.

Unfortunately, the modernist features of the structure were not replicated in the mosaic windows that line the sides of the church.  They're colorful, yes, but too busy and complex.

An exception is a fine piece on the left side, near the front door.














The dome is at once powerful and elegant.  Other concrete elements (some of which, on close inspection, need work) anticipate the brutalist era that began in the 1950s.

Christ on his throne, and the angels to either side, are by Achille Funi (another artist favored by the Fascists, and influenced by Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical style).

Bill

The Vision on Largo Ascianghi: an Inquiry

We happened upon this large and intriguing paste-up one evening while walking in Largo Ascianghi, opposite Nanni Moretti's cinema, near Porta Portese.  The building in the background of the paste-up, well known to followers of Rome's modern architecture, closely resembles one of four modernist post offices built by Mussolini's regime in the 1930s.  This one is located on via Marmorata, not far from the Pyramid, and it's still used, as are the others, as a post office.  The building haunts the scene in a way reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico's urban 'scapes.  The mural is by RomaBolognaCooperazione, or RoBoCoop.   

The via Marmorata Post Office, Life Magazine, 1940

Curiously, though, the figures in the foreground ride horses rather than drive cars, and they're engaged in tasks that could be described as pre-industrial, including sawing logs with a 2-man hand saw.  At center, four people carry what might be a coffin.  At left, goods are moved by a primitive cart, with thick and possibly wooden wheels, drawn by an ox.  In front/center, the capital from an ancient column suggests that the glories of that period--and, indeed, any interest in it--are in the past.  In the right foreground, a woman rides behind a man on horseback, one dressed in an animal skin tunic of the sort normally identified with cave men.  The number of people in the scene suggest a community, engaged in construction, or reconstruction.

As it turns out, the Ascianghi mural is a redoing of a late-15th-century work (picture below) by Piero di Cosimo, known as an "eccentric" artist.  The workers in the foreground--the same in both works--are engaged in constructing the building in the background. 

What might RoBoCoop have had in mind?  On the one hand, the artist(s) could be suggesting that as much as everything changes, everything stays the same.  Yes, the nature of work changes, but construction goes on, and with some resemblance in the buildings, even though they are some 450 years apart.  Or the RoBoCoop piece could be a comment on the apocalypse, on a post-nuclear world in which humanity has lost all but its most basic skills, a world marked in time by the survival of at least one 20th-century building, a remnant of a pre-nuclear world.

We welcome members' thoughts and ideas.

Bill
PS - We realized only later that we met a couple of the RoBoCoop artists during the Open House Roma weekend - another plus for that spectacular event.
And thanks to Jess Stewart for helping us figure out the artists here.

Pittura Metafisica: an Exploration of Metaphysical Painting

Albert Savinio, "Objects Abandoned in the Forest," 1928.  Timelessness achieved through a blending of the primeval forest with metallic-looking objects, many of modern design.   Savinio was de Chirico's brother.  

de Chirico, "Malinconia," ("Melancholy")
 1912

For the past six weeks we've been wrestling, on and off, with the idea of "Metaphysical Painting," spurred by the comprehensive Giorgio Morandi retrospective here in Rome. The term was originally Italian--Pittura Metafisica--having been invented by Giorgio de Chirico and long associated with de Chirico and the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà whom de Chirico met in Ferrara in 1917.  (De Chirico was born in Greece in 1886, lived in Italy beginning in 1909 and specifically in Rome from 1944 until his death in 1978.) The standard take on Metaphysical Painting, then, is that it was a short-lived "movement"--coinciding with the 2nd decade of the 20th century--and dominated by de Chirico and Carrà.

Some authorities include the still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi, but only those done between 1918 and 1922, when the artist was doing self-consciously metaphysical work, including "Metaphysical Still Life" (1918, left).



Less often, some others are admitted to the metaphysical pantheon, including Felici Casorati, Massimo Campigli, George Grosz and Filippo de Pisis. The first metaphysical painting was de Chirico's "l'enigma di un pomeriggio d'autunno" ("The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon"), accomplished in Florence in 1910 after the artist experienced an epiphany at Santa Croce.

Carrà, "The Metaphysical Muse," 1917
Universal mannequin, dressed as
tennis player

A general sense of Metaphysical Painting can be gleaned from the words and phrases used to describe and characterize the paintings: "dreamlike imagery," "impossible linear perspectives," an "almost architectural sense of stillness" (said to derive from Renaissance art), "eerie mood," "strange artificiality," "haunted streets one might encounter in dreams," "featureless mannequins."  There is general agreement that there is something disquieting about the work, that it speaks of "sorrow, disorientation, [and] nostalgia," that it offers "a world estranged from man."  Art historian Mariana Aguirre adds that metaphysical painting involved a change in what we understand an artist to be.  The standard idea is that the artist is a craftsman, learned in the styles, techniques and history that go with the trade.  The metaphysical artist is, instead, a "thinker and privileged seer," a self-conscious intellectual.

That all rings true to us, and these descriptive, and sometimes analytical, phrases may be all we need, or want, to understand the phenomenon.  But in the interest of clarifying--or one might say, murkifying--Metaphysical Painting, we found ourselves wanting to know about metaphysics.  Just what is metaphysics, anyway?

Franz Marc, "The Shepherds," 1912.  The horse is every horse,
the shepherds stripped to their naked essence, outside of time.

Well, it's not physics.  Although both physics and metaphysics seek to examine and explain things, physics (and science generally) wants empirical answers--proof--while metaphysics looks for "underlying principles that give rise to the unified natural world."  Put another way, metaphysics looks beyond or beneath science to observe something more fundamental.  On the other hand, it seems obvious that there are similarities between the breadth and timing of the painterly inquiries of de Chirico and others, and the scientific efforts of Einstein to explain the nature of matter.  

The word "unified" in "unified natural world" is important, because metaphysicians believe that there are "hidden connections between things," connections our senses tell us must and do exist, but which we do not and cannot see.  (There is something new-agey in that, something close to or bound up with religion, but we'll have to abandon that line of inquiry and go on.) 

Massimo Campigli, "The Gypsies," 1928.
Gypsies, acqueducts, a game of cards.
What's happened to time?

How can "things" be connected?  The answer to that question has to do with "space" and "time" and the relationship between space and time.  Normally we privilege--that is, favor, and emphasize--the present, and so do our painters, usually, painting (for example) a picture of people on a boat having a good time [Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party"]--at a particular moment in the present, or the past.  Metaphysics takes a different approach.

Perhaps, it hypothesizes, space and time don't depend on people at all.  Maybe space and time are substances that exist "independently" of their inhabitants.  If so, one can imagine--indeed, one can have--things from one "time" in the same frame, the same picture, the same space, as things from another time.  Of course, something like that happens in an antique shop, but for metaphysics there isn't really "another" time.  Indeed, time may not "pass"; past and present are one.  Stasis--or a sense of stasis--reigns.  

Mario Sironi, "Malinconia," 1927.   Modern man/woman,
trapped between the present and the aqueduct past.

Although Carrà was a Futurist and had much to do with metaphysical painting, it seems to us that the Futurists' sense of time was different.  Futurism wanted to show people engaged in a particular act at a particular time: a soccer player kicking a ball, a bicyclist riding, a plane in flight.  In contrast, metaphysical painters a) removed man b) deleted the privileged present, suggesting a unity of past and present, and c) eliminated movement, emphasizing a stasis designed to evoke the eternal, the mysterious, the ultimately unknowable core of the universe.   Stasis is central to de Chirico's work, as is the fusion of time(s), signified by his placement of Greek or Roman forms in the modern space of a 20th-century city.  

Poster for the German expressionist film,
"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," 1921

Why the 1910s?  For one thing, plumbing the depths for the "real" truth was part of the spirit of the age--for Einstein in physics, for Freud in psychoanalysis, for de Chirico in painting.  In addition, the heyday of metaphysical painting covers, and doubtless exists as a comment on, the decade of the Great War.  That said, much work in a metaphysical vein was done after 1920, and not only by painters such as Grosz and Alberto Savinio. The "impossible linear perspectives" of de Chirico appear in German expressionist cinema throughout the 1920s.

The use of metaphysical ideas in a contemporary painting.

It is common to run across recent works of art with metaphysical content.  Indeed, the apartment we inhabited recently had two of them: one a de Chiricoesque treatment that features a variety of forms, most of them geometric, isolated and yet somehow unified, suspended against a somewhat mysterious blue/green background.  In the other (right), two children sleep in a room whose shape has been distorted, perhaps to emphasize children's fear of the dark or being in bed. In this sense--the sense that metaphysical features can be and still are being used to achieve a goal, the metaphysical is still with us.




Similarly, today's graphic artist might employ the design sensibilities of the 1960s to attract buyers to a new line of bell-bottom jeans or mini-skirts.  Or, more germane, an advertising agency could employ a certain degree of metaphysical distortion of space to create a poster for a film noir production.  But to use metaphysical artistic practices is different from engaging metaphysical concepts and questions in the way that the founders or early practitioners did.  So it could be said that metaphysical art was significant conceptually only in its early years--certainly the decade of the 1910s, with declining intensity and curiosity in the 1920s and 1930s.  Indeed, metaphysical painting in Italy was under attack as early as 1917, when the term "metafisico" began to be used negatively. In an era of strong nationalist sentiment, the movement was vulnerable because its Italian roots were suspect.  Others saw it as overly intellectual (and perhaps not masculine enough for the Fascists), and one influential critic described it as "illustration" rather than painting.  

Bill  

de Chirico, "Red Tower," 1913