Concentrating on Italian painting and sculpture during the first half of the 20th century, Italia Nova invites visitors to discover or rediscover a whole section of European art from this period which is still little known in France.
The exhibition is well timed, coming after Melancholy. Genius and Madness in the West, which included two works by de Chirico and one by Sironi, and during the celebration of the centenary of the death of Cezanne, who was so important to many artists in the Italian avant-garde movements (de Chirico and Morandi in particular).
Some hundred and twenty works highlight the most significant Italian artistic movements: Futurism, Metaphysical Painting, Magical Realism and the Novecento movement, as well as the most conceptual works of the 50s. Alongside famous works by de Chirico, Morandi, Fontana or Burri are paintings and sculptures of artists much less often exhibited in France: Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Casorati, Campigli, Depero, Martini, Prampolini, Severini, Sironi, Savinio, … and special homage is paid to Morandi.
Italy played an eminent role in European art in the first half of the 20th century, through the innovative character of Futurism, but also through its utterly original contribution to the rediscovery of "classical measure" which occurred almost everywhere in Europe after the experiments of the first historical avant-garde movements. The exhibition compares and questions the two extremes of artistic research in Italy at the time: on the one hand, the rejection of tradition by the Futurists; on the other hand, the return to certain classical forms.
The exhibition opens with Balla’s 1904 painting, Elisa on the Door: the young woman invites us to step into the new century. The modern nature of this work with its daring photographic cut-outs already outstrips the Realism and Symbolism which dominated the arts in Italy in the late 19th century. In the same room, a 1909 painting by Boccioni, Workshops at Porta Romana, reveals a new spirit, a few months before the Futurist theories (The Manifesto of Futurist Painters dates from 11th of February 1910) and sums up the aspirations of the new generation of Italian painters. They wanted to break with the pictorial tradition of the late 19th century and to promote modernity, understood primarily as change and innovation.
