Catalog of the exhibition at Palazzo Reale Milan, October 19, 2021 – February 27, 2022
The definition “Magic Realism” concerns a moment in Italian art circumscribed in about twenty years, which is characterized by a return to craft in painting.
The exhibition and accompanying catalog aim to present for the first time in Italy a comprehensive presentation of the art movement of Magic Realism, a fundamental strand of Italian painting that developed in the 1920s and 1930s, with insights into the European art scene of the time.
Magical Realism transposed into painting the climate of instability and restlessness that characterized Italian society between the two world wars. The movement was grafted onto a general recovery of the plastic values of the art of the past, from Giotto to Masaccio to Piero della Francesca, up to the formation of the specific realist and magical formulary of Cagnaccio di San Pietro, Antonio Donghi, Ubaldo Oppi, Achille Funi, and Mario and Edita Broglio, who are the pivotal artists of the exhibition along with Felice Casorati, Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà and Gino Severini .
The scholarly project includes a nucleus of about eighty works, among the most important and characterizing works of the movement, with the intention of comprehensively reconstructing the climate of the period, with a view to the international enhancement of Italian art.
The catalog is enriched by some historical texts by Emilio Bertonati, among the first to study and value the movement, of which he was not only a pioneering critic but also a passionate collector.
BY
GABRIELLABELLI – Italian art historian and, since 2011, director of the Fondazione Musei Civici in Venice. She is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Musei Civici in Brescia, MAX in Chiasso, Villa Panza FAI-Varese, and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome.
VALERIO TERRAROLI – Lecturer at the University of Turin in History of Contemporary Art and History of Decorative Arts (between 2001 and 2012), since January 2013 she has been teaching History of Art Criticism; Museology; History of Decorative Arts; and History of Contemporary Art (since 2019) at the University of Verona.
