‘Towards Monet. History of the landscape from the seventeenth to the twentieth century ‘until February 9 at the Gran Guardia in Verona and from February 22 to May 4 in Vicenza in the Palladian Basilica
MILAN – Until February 9 at the Gran Guardia in Verona, with a repeat in Vicenza, in the Basilica Palladiana, from 22 February to 4 May 2014, it will be possible to admire the masterpieces brought together by Marco Goldin in the great exhibition “Verso Monet. History of the landscape from the seventeenth to the twentieth century “. Regarding this new proposal, the curator states: “It is an exhibition that comes at the end of two exciting years of work, around an idea that has always fascinated me, that of reconstructing my history of the landscape in painting. Also mixing, and then putting together, experiences that are perhaps geographically distant but close in terms of language and sentiment “.THE PROTAGONIST OF NATURE – The exhibition starts with a work by Annibale Carracci and one by Domenichino to underline how in painting, between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, nature begins to take on an autonomous role, no longer limited to a purely scenographic backdrop. Then the first section, that on the seventeenth century, divided, reflecting on the concept of false and true of nature, between Poussin, Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on the one hand (precisely in the direction of the new landscape of Carracci and Domenichino) and the great Dutch on the other ( especially obviously Jacob van Ruisdael and his studio from life). With an important integration reserved for drawing, for example by Rembrandt, to underline this fundamental area in the new definition of the landscape, linked precisely to the truth of the story. VEDUTISM– The second section, the one on the eighteenth century, offers numerous and beautiful views of the Venetians, from Canaletto to Bellotto to Guardi, again on the relationship, as in Holland in the previous century, between art, science and empiricism. Venice looms up here in all its glory. NINETEENTH CENTURY, CENTURY OF NATURE – Then the fascinating sequence of rooms on the nineteenth century, the so-called century of nature: first the romantic sphere with the sublime Friedrich and Turner and then the mediation with realism through Constable. And in the great part on realism, the combinations, with identical dates, for example between American and Scandinavian painters, and then obviously Corot, Courbet and Millet in France, their relations with the painters of Eastern Europe, to mark the many paths of the description of reality in the middle of the century.IMPRESSIONISM – Finally, the epochal impressionist novelty, first with the paintings of the sixties and early seventies (Pissarro, Sisley, Caillebotte, Manet), then the eighties. “On this decade I insist a lot in the exhibition, says Goldin, illustrating it with very beautiful and famous paintings by Cezanne, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Degas. To indicate the fall of the dogma of the open air and the entry into modernity, when the landscape also becomes a projection of the mind “. MONET– The exhibition ends with the 25 works of Monet, a real exhibition within the exhibition, to say that from the tradition linked to reality (seventeenth-century Holland, the forest of Fontainebleau) in him we pass to the dissolution of matter through the abandonment of total plein-air. Monet, who had theorized in the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century the absolute need to be in front of, and in the midst of, nature in order to paint it, at the end of his life, first with the Cathedrals and then with the Water Lilies (all present in the exhibition) , returns to a contamination between the true of nature and artifice.
To those who asked him if he still painted from life, he replied that this was not interesting, because “the result is everything”. January 20, 2014
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