Pittura Metafisica

Questo saggio prende in esame i disegni di Aldo Rossi, soprattutto quelli in cui emergono il privato oppure la sensibilità non strettamente progettuale dell’architetto. Viene fatta anche una digressione su quali elementi rappresentino, da parte di Aldo Rossi, un contributo tardivo, e assolutamente personale, alla pittura metafisica (AA.VV., Aldo Rossi. Drawings and paintings, Princeton Architectural Press, 1993, p. 11).

This work aims at providing a critical reading of Alberto Moravia’s
La natività, a story written in 1929 and republished, under the head -
ing of “unpublished”, in 2015. The paper is structured around this
short text because it is one of the most tangible examples of the
Todorovian uncertainty, between “reality” and “unreality” that
charac terizes Moravia’s fantastic narrative production, while he had
long been – wrongly – identified as an exclusively realist writer. Our
analysis highlights how the origins of La Natività are intrinsically
linked to Massimo Bontempelli’s avant-garde experiment, which
brings young Moravia closer to magical realism and metaphysical
painting. However, the author of La Natività reinterprets in his own
way the theoretical principles defined by Bontempelli in “900.
Cahiers d’Italie et d’Europe”: pushing the conception of the work
of art as an object to extreme, he doesn’t focus on the magical aura
that can arise from an objective representation of reality and
chooses instead to paint that atmosphere of everyday unreality in
which he, like his characters, is forced to live under Fascism.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship of the Berlin-based artist George Grosz and the eclectic poet and art critic Theodor Däubler with reference to their mutual interest in Italian modern art, from Futurism to Metafisica. Through the prism of their interaction, it is possible to follow the double fortune of Metafisica in Berlin in the year 1920 thanks to the intricate network of contacts and collaborations that, mostly through art magazines, facilitated the circulation of images by de Chirico and Carrà as part of a shared international visual culture, open to multiple stylistic and ideological interpretations.

De Chirico’s Metaphysical art aimed at admiring (then painting) the world in its quintessence, i.e. to look at the world “as if it were the first time”. During his life the painter suffered from various health disorders, however, one of them somehow  helped him in reaching his artistic goal: the migraine aura and its consequent hallucinations. The latter, were sometimes mistaken for true reality as De Chirico was totally unaware of his disease. As a consequence, the artist, who was also deeply influenced by the Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch, believed to possess alleged powers of perception-intuition. This “higher or parallel dimension perceived only by him”, ended up nourishing that purely elitist character that the Pictor Optimus automatically attributed to his figure, both artistically and existentially.
My paper intends to determine how the aforementioned disease was also a concrete source of inspiration and revelation, furthermore my study aims at highlighting how this disease increased the already voluminous ego of the painter along with his conviction of alleged divinatory or initiatory powers.

Allestita al MUDEC di Milano per l’autunno-inverno 2018|2019, la mostra «Paul Klee e le origini dell’arte» si propone di avviare una revisione della categoria storico-artistica di «primitivismo». Si cercherà, sulla scorta di estese e articolate ricerche sulle fonti figurative di Klee, di circoscrivere e delimitare l’interesse di Klee per l’arte «primitiva». Mostrando che esiste, da parte dell’artista, un interesse spiccato e durevole per determinate epoche preclassiche dell’arte occidentale (come l’Egitto faraonico) o (ancor più) per epoche sino al tempo considerate «barbariche» o di decadenza, come l’arte tardo-antica, l’arte paleocristiana e copta, l’Alto Medioevo, il primo Rinascimento tedesco. Che l’interesse per l’arte africana, oceanica o mesoamericana ha invece un ruolo derivato e minore, tanto da risolversi non di rado in pastiche. Anch’esso, tuttavia, si sviluppa secondo linee interne alla storia dell’arte occidentale; e matura attraverso un dialogo sino ad oggi scarsamente indagato con la generazione simbolista da un lato, in particolare precursori “etnografici” o etnograficizzanti quali Redon, Munch e Ensor; e la caricatura dall’altro.


ENG:

The exhibition proposed by MUDEC sets out to offer a new and more precise definition of “primitivism” in early 20th-century art, referred specifically to Klee but not stopping there. By and large, when we speak of “primitivism” we are thinking of something associated with an interest in imitating “tribal” African and Oceanic art. “Primitivism”, therefore, is understood as a style.

Anyway, for Klee as well as other artists ranging from Matisse to Picasso, the concept of “primitive” went well beyond the “ethnographic” category. The MUDEC exhibition will explore Paul Klee’s involvement in the “primitivist” movement and show how truly personalized it was, as he interiorized the stylistic and conceptual innovations of “primitive” art in the framework of his own cues and theories on painting, then added them to the inspiration he found both in pre-classical (Egyptian and Early Greek, for instance) and (even more) post-classical Western tradition (Early Christian, Middle Age, German Early Renaissance), whose appreciation and relevance is more immediately detectable, in Klee, than interests focused on “ethnography” or “ethnographical art”.

The exhibition will contain a selection of the artist’s works alongside a range of other related items, included magazines and other archival materials that document Klee’s specific background in these areas of art-historical|archeological knowledge and taste.

Tra i vari ed innumerevoli disturbi di salute di cui De Chirico soffrì per gran parte della sua esistenza, uno risulta particolarmente rilevante nell’analisi della sua produzione artistica: l’aura emicranica e le sue conseguenti allucinazioni.
Il paper vuole soffermarsi sul ruolo che esse effettivamente svolsero inquadrandole sia nell’economia della produzione artistica che in quella della Weltanschauung - infatti se da un lato esse  offrivano imprescindibili spunti di ispirazione e intuizioni artistiche, dall’altro scardinavano la percezione di una realtà già percepita filosoficamente, nietzscheanamente: l’intento principale della Metafisica era scoprire (per poi dipingere) il mondo nella sua quintessenza, guardandolo “come fosse la prima volta”.
E’ sulla scia di questo sguardo che le allucinazioni emicraniche giocano un ruolo fondamentale:  a volte scambiate per vera realtà, a volte per presunti poteri di percezione-intuizione di una realtà superiore o parallela che solo lui vedeva, esse alimentarono quel carattere prettamente elitario che il Pictor Optimus automaticamente attribuiva alla sua figura, sia sul piano artistico che esistenziale.
In conclusione il mio studio intende: 1) Stabilire in quali modalitàla suddetta malattia fosse anche concreta fonte di ispirazione e rivelazione. 2) Evidenziare come la stessa ingigantì il già voluminoso ego del pittore accrescendone la convinzione di presunti poteri divinatori o iniziatici.

The magazine “Valori Plastici”, published in Rome between 1918 and 1922, directed by Mario Broglio, had a decisive role in the European artistic context after the IWW. It proposed the works of an innovative group of Italian artists like Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Savinio, Arturo Martini and Edita Broglio, who sustained to rediscover the roots of their own artistic languages in the Italian Medieval and Renaissance tradition. The magazine was a remarkable medium for the international spread of the metaphysical painting, that took place when the main characters outdistanced from that language favoring a more naturalistic one. In fact, “Valori Plastici” suggested the metaphysical painting as an innovative language of avant-garde but also as a language that followed the Italian artistic tradition.
The proposal highlights this ambiguous interpretation of metaphysical painting given by “Valori Plastici”. Analyzing the exhibition activity of “Valori Plastici”, specifically the tour in Germany in 1921, and the participation at the Fiorentina Primaverile in Florence in 1922, it will be reconstructed how Broglio intended to present the metaphysical painting during the exhibits of “Valori Plastici”, and if it was a stragetic move to propose that language to the public in different ways.

"In this symposium I will compare the historiographic methodologies that appeared in Italy at the beginning of the eighties with the opposite postmodernists theories sustained by critics like Benjamin Buchloch.
The so-called “Return to painting” in Italy, including labels like “Transavanguardia”, tried to rehabilitate figures usually linked with anti-avantgardism and reactionarism, like Giorgio De Chirico after his disengagement with Surrealists, or Mario Sironi, who influenced Fascist style.
Italian critics associated with neo-figurative tendencies rejected as outdated any ideological judgement regarding realistic painting and its claims to a national style, particularly those derived from the historicistic interpretation adopted by Giulio Carlo Argan, the most influential contemporary art historian in Italy after 1945.
The exhibitions held after 1979, like “La Pittura Metafisica” or “Anni Venti”, proposed a new vision to re-evaluate Metafisica’s role, in opposition to Futurism’s supremacy based on an avanguardistic progression.
This effort to revise the political reactionary engagement of figures like Sironi or De Chirico, was preceded by the ex-Communist historian Renzo De Felice’s broadly reconciliatory approach toward Fascism in his lengthy biography of Mussolini.
At the same time, Communist Party, leaded by Enrico Berlinguer, began a renovating political strategy to emancipate itself from totalitarian policy of U.S.S.R. This change had a correspondent approach among art critics and historians close to the Party that culminated in the “Biennale del Dissenso” (1977) where artists persecuted by the sovietic regime can exposed their banished works.
The Revisionist tendency -and its art-historical version- deeply influenced Jean Clair, who was, during the seventies, close to italian critics like Luigi Carluccio and who organized Les Réalismes (1981), the most fervent attempt to eliminate the “avant-garde” category in historical methodology.
From the opposite side, Buchloch accused Clair of being a “new reactionary anti-modernist” and promoting an approach to the arts “outside the historical and political context”.
Buchloch’s Postmodern thought aimed primarily to revise Greenberg’s Modernism while, at the same time, reaffirming some of its aspects (such as the distinction between the avant-garde and kitsch) thus contradicting Clair’s theory.
In placing Greenberg’s theory at the center of Postmodernism’s change, Buchloh didn’t consider the possibility of other historical legacies in different political contexts such as Italy or France."

L’articolo si propone di mettere in rilievo ciò che accomuna gli scritti saggistici di Bontempelli sulle arti visive, la cui materia è di natura teorica o critica applicata, alle sue esperienze narrative, traducendosi nella tendenza poetica del realismo magico. Il tessuto connettivo è rappresentato più direttamente dai casi in cui gli espedienti compositivi ed espressivi messi in atto dall’autore si profilano sulla base delle tendenze trasfigurative analoghe della pittura italiana quattrocentesca, nonché in concomitanza con una visuale propria dell’arte moderna di stampo metafisico (De Chirico, Carrà, Martini). Sull’esempio del libro "Appassionata incompetenza", in cui la riflessione estetica bontempelliana attiene direttamente all’ambito della figuratività, si cerca inoltre in particolare di esplorare la motivazione letteraria delle osservazioni, nonché le modalità di trattazione dell'elemento irriducibilmente pittorico o scultoreo. Si nota altresì la poeticizzazione della sostanza visiva, talvolta impregnata di concezioni caratterizzanti la prosa d'arte.