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Luigi Bartolini. Through color: from 29 October 2023 to 7 April 2024

This year marks the 60th anniversary of his disappearance.

Luigi Bartolini. Through color: from 29 October 2023 to 7 April 2024.

Macerata. From 29 October 2023 to 7 April 2024 i Civic Museums of Palazzo Buonaccorsi in Macerata present the exhibition “Luigi Bartolini through color”, an in-depth study on the pictorial production of Luigi Bartolini (1892-1963), a multifaceted master from Cupra whose birthday is celebrated this year 60th anniversary of his death.

The exhibition was presented this morning during a press conference in the courtyard of Palazzo Buonaccorsi which saw the presence of the Undersecretary for Culture the Hon. Vittorio Sgarbi, of the regional councilor Anna Menghi representing the Councilor for Culture of the Marche Region Chiara Biondi, of the mayor Sandro Parcaroli, of the municipal councilor for culture Katiuscia Cassetta, of the artist's daughter Luciana Bartolini and the curator Manuel Carrera who led the preview.

In the afternoon, in the same location, a parterre of royals, instead he participated in the inauguration and the cutting of the ribbon.

Curated by Manuel Carrera, the exhibition is part of the program of events promoted by the Marche Region to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Luigi Bartolini, which involves 5 municipalities: Cupramontana, Macerata, Urbino, Osimo and Camerino led by the Municipality of Macerata. A tribute necessary to rediscover the links with the Marche and introduce the new generations to a great artist from the Marche. The study committee chaired by Vittorio Sgarbi and supported by Luciana Bartolini, daughter of the artist, has given rise to an important moment of analysis and valorization whose results will be presented in the busy calendar of initiatives scheduled until April 7, 2024.

“Luigi Bartolini was a great artist, solitary, out of the mainstream – the Hon. Undersecretary for Culture spoke. Vittorio Sgarbi -. An artist who works a lot in Rome and impacts with an emotional intensity equal to Morandi. The very intense, almost spiteful concentration of his sign, the dramatic vision of the etchings make it unique. And let's not forget that Luigi Bartolini was also the author of the novel 'Bicycle Thieves'. It is therefore right to honor him in this Bartholinian year, thanks also to the will of his daughter Luciana, in his region of origin in places such as Macerata, Cupramontana, Urbino, Osimo and Camerino, linked to the artist".

“Thanks to a circuit of five cities that belong to Bartolini's biography – says the regional councilor for culture Chiara Biondi in the message sent to those present – we are able to tell the beauty and complexity of an artist who has a leading place in twentieth-century Italy. In the case of Macerata, a vast selection of works shows us a style and artistic choices characterized by a lyrical vision of reality that is always very personal. By celebrating Luigi Bartolini, the Marche Region celebrates a very talented artist who was able to explore very different languages. I thank the municipal administrations, the Study Committee chaired by Vittorio Sgarbi and the artist's daughter for having believed in this project and for having been able to implement initiatives together with the Region which in such a rich way describe this great fellow countryman of ours".

“60 years after his death, the Marche Region celebrates and remembers Luigi Bartolini, engraver, painter, writer to whom the homage of an entire territory goes and that of the city of Macerata, leading municipality of this choral project – said the mayor Sandro Parcaroli -. Five cities online which, with actions of sharing, collaboration, valorisation and promotion, celebrate the multifaceted artist who has given so much to our region. Thanks to this precious common project, we are rediscovering and giving back to the younger generations an artist with a unique talent."

“The Region strongly wanted this initiative to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the death of Luigi Bartolini. He wanted it as he wanted all the events which, by celebrating them, enhance the artists who have left a mark in the history of art and, more generally, in the history of culture of our country – said the regional councilor Anna Menghi -. Celebrating Bartolini 60 years after his death is useful to make him known to the new generations, in an era in which protecting art is equivalent to protecting the course of events that have meant values ​​and principles of a common feeling for our part of the world . The Marche Region also shared and appreciated the curators' desire to involve all the localities which, in various ways, were affected by the artist's passage. As a member of the Legislative Assembly I can only consider this a unique opportunity to promote the region from a tourist perspective - and after thanking Sgarbi for agreeing to chair the Study Committee supported by the artist's daughter Luciana Bartolini he concluded his intervention stating that – culture is freedom. With culture we learn to live together and defend peace. For this reason the current majority in the Regional Council has intended to support this and other initiatives, respecting all territorial vocations".

“With the exhibition dedicated to Bartolini, the Civic Museums of Macerata pay homage to a great artist of the twentieth century, a master who also lived in Macerata and who was inspired by our land and who deserves due in-depth analysis of his pictorial production which we are honored to host through important national loans and the generosity of his daughter Luciana – said the Councilor for Culture Katiuscia Cassetta -. An exhibition born within an organic path of valorisation and rediscovery of a multifaceted artist which saw us involved as a leading body between five municipalities in the Marche region and which allowed our structure to further grow in skills and organizational capabilities put to use disposal of the entire network that was created to underline every aspect of Luigi Bartolini's artistic research. The exhibition itinerary will give us all the knowledge of a painter who loved to observe our lands, our places, our women and the objects he used daily, offering us, even today, the possibility of having a profound look and the possibility of stopping to observe what surrounds us more calmly, to grasp its profound intimacy and richness".

Luciana Bartolini, Luigi's daughter, as well as thanking those who made it possible the global project linked to the artist which affects the Marche and the places affiliated with Bartolini, telling anecdotes related to his childhood, instead remembered Bartolini as a man and father, portraying a private, personal profile, underlining the merits of a parent who is not at all "grumpy".

“The exhibition 'Luigi Bartolini through colour' offers an in-depth analysis of the pictorial production of the Marche artist exactly forty years after the last retrospective in Ancona and over thirty years since the one in Macerata. Compared to then, today we present unpublished and little-known works, coming from important museum collections and prestigious private collections. This is the fruit – commented the curator of the exhibition Manuel Carrera - of a great job by the organization. Among the masterpieces loaned we have 'The mountain partridge' from the Museo Novecento in Florence, already mentioned by the well-known critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti; 'Reapers' from the civic collections of Forlì, commissioned by Giuseppe Verzocchi, or the canvases belonging to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome”.

Luigi Bartolini, also prolific in engraving, in literature and art criticism, he expressed himself in painting with an original and modern language, capable of combining traditional subjects with the power of colour and the impetus of the gesture typical of the twentieth century.

From the tangents with the secessionist styles to the tonalist propensity, the over sixty works on display, coming from museums and prestigious private collections, document the profound figurative culture of the painter Bartolini, one of the most interesting artistic figures of the last century. Eclectic personality with a lively polemical streak, with his figuration he contrasted the recovery of tradition promoted by Italian painting during the twenty years of fascism, arousing, at the exhibitions of the time, on the one hand the skepticism of the conservatives, on the other theenthusiasm of the most attentive critics. A comparison with the graphic work also highlights the plurality of directions in his research, with the aim of giving him back his rightful place in the history of twentieth-century Italian painting.

The exhibition itinerary

Enriched with unpublished documents and photographs, the exhibition itinerary unfolds through four thematic sections. The first addresses a key aspect of Bartolini's production: that of domestic intimacy. In line with the subjects favored by Italian painters of the first twenty years of the twentieth century, the artist created starting from 1914 a series of oil paintings depicting interiors and portraits of family and friends. However, despite the reassuring atmosphere and the delicate lyricism that characterizes them, Bartolini renounces that realism of impressionist memory then appreciated by bourgeois collectors, preferring a marked expressionist tension to it. Works like Armanda (1914, private collection) e Anna's room (1914, private collection) present clear affinities with the research of new recruits of the Italian "secessions", in particular Gino Rossi, while the predilection for essential lines and bright colors, rendered with broad brushstrokes and full of matter, reveals a profound knowledge of international painting. Bartolini's Fauvist attitude can also be found in his paintings executed in the following decades, as proof on the one hand of a stubborn search for coherence, on the other of a curiosity towards modern figuration, by the painters of “School on Via Cavour” negli thirties to De Pisis and Guttuso since the post-war period.

 

The journey continues with the second section dedicated to still lifes which, by his own admission, play an extremely important role within his vast production: «[…] I have always enjoyed and in the most subtle, profound, great, ineffable way when I made art. I also enjoyed when I engraved dead mice, fish bones, stuffed butterflies: the most clumsy things for others, for me they constituted poems which, I repeat, lifted me up to heaven." Thus Bartolini stated in the introductory text to the engraving staff at the Quadrennial of 1935. A comparison with production on paper highlights analogies and contradictions in dealing with the same type of subjects - which he sometimes takes up using different media - even within the context of a path of absolute coherence. Common to engraved and painted still lifes is the lyrical and introspective accent given to the representation of humble everyday objects: theirs, however, is different interpretation, instinctive, essential and joyful in painting, contemplative and veiledly melancholic in the recording.

We then continue with the landscape, moving ideally the look beyond the window of Bartolini's house, immortalized in the large drawing on paper The young family (1928, private collection). The evolution of his language is thus retraced through the landscapes, in which he demonstrates that he favors a summary vision of reality, all light and colour, with a strong emotional impact. This modus operandi will be fully expressed especially in the mature phase of his career, worthy of rediscovery: in 1957, with the painting Suburbs (Macerata, Palazzo Buonaccorsi) won the prestigious “National Scipione Award”, then in its second edition.

The final section of the exhibition, entitled Songs of Life finally examines those genre scenes which, far from having an anecdotal character, document theinternalized interpretation that Bartolini offers of reality. Excerpts from daily life, rendered with sometimes bold colours, in which connections with his refined literary production can be recognised. To this production belong works such as The hermitage of 1942 (Rome, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art) and the reapers created for the collection of Giuseppe Verzocchi around 1949 (Forlì, Pinacoteca Civica), works exceptionally loaned.

Information
www.musei.macerata.it | Phone: 0733 256361

Opening hours
November/March: from Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 – 13:00 / 15:00 – 17:30
April, May and October: from Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 – 13:00 / 14:30 – 18:30
The ticket office closes 30 minutes before of the indicated time.

Entrance fees
https://www.macerataculture.it/orari_tariffe/

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