Boccioni a Venezia Dagli anni romani alla mostra d'estate a Ca' Pesaro Momenti della stagione futurista
curated by Ester Coen, Licisco Magagnato e Guido Perocco
01.12.1985 - 31.01.1986
Introduction
The exhibition Boccioni a Venezia, organized by Galleria dello Scudo and Museo di Castelvecchio, was held in Verona in the winter of 1985-1986. It analysed the relationships that the leading personality of Italian futurism had with the movement that sees him as its protagonist and with the lively artistic milieu linked to the Venetian exhibitions in Ca’ Pesaro, at the beginning of the 20th century a reference point for new trends inspired by modernism and novelties from beyond the Alps.
The exhibition, organized under the patronage of Regione del Veneto, was divided into two distinct but complementary sections, in a fruitful collaboration between public and private initiatives. The first, “Dagli anni romani alla mostra d’estate a Ca’ Pesaro”, gathered together in Galleria dello Scudo over fifty paintings and a core of drawings, pastels and engravings dated between 1902 and 1910. The second, “Momenti della stagione futurista”, was displayed at Museo di Castelvecchio with paintings from the period 1910–1916.
In the first section, the exhibition route opened with Boccioni’s first experiments in his formative years at the school of Giacomo Balla, attended together with Severini and Sironi: Campagna romana (1903), loaned by Museo Civico di Belle Arti in Lugano, is an exceptional essay of the “new modern technique of ‘divisionism’.” The show continued with the documentation of his travels to Paris and Russia in 1906. During the months spent in Tzaritzin, he painted the great Ritratto di Sophie Popoff, the only known canvas from his Russian stay, remained unknown for a long time and found abroad shortly before the exhibition in Verona. The section then proposed an unprecedented research on the period between Padua and Venice, characterised by pictorial results based on a new conception of light energy and on the use of colour fragmented into a dense texture. Remarkable results of this new phase are Ritratto di scultore and Canal grande a Venezia, both from 1907. The strong bond with his mother, whom he often visited during the year, is testified by some works on paper, including the pastel portrait sent by Musei e Gallerie Pontificie, Città del Vaticano.
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Artist
Among the main exponents of Italian futurism, after a divisionist phase shared with friends Balla and Severini met in Rome around 1899, in 1909 Umberto Boccioni was in Paris where he met Marinetti. In 1910 he signed the Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist painting) and in 1912 the one of the Futurist sculpture. The works realized in this period aim to render the interpenetration of forms moving in space in painting and sculpture.
