The spatial module to which the painter arrived in the post-war period, after the tonal painting practiced in the context of the Roman School, does not mark a break with the past, rather it situates itself along a coherent evolutionary path which, wanting to grasp the tension derived from being immersed in reality , on the basis of the teaching received in childhood by the two little blind men, he intends to extract a single sign from the multiplicity of things. In "Surface 141" the tonal and formal agreements of the background - if we can still speak of the relationship between background and figure - contrast with the segmented tears that cross the structure of the canvas from top to bottom and from left to right justifying, a perceptual level, a double reading in terms of direction and speed.

The work was created in Mexico during the artist's American stay (1941 - 1943). The Russian element evoked in this intense painting is poetically present in the fantastic solution of the landscape, which is the dear and familiar one of childhood in Vitebsk: old wooden dachas, narrow streets of fences, signs in shops, young lovers, pets, united in a "supernatural" world - according to Apollinaire's definition - anyway fantastic and surreal of idyllic stillness. The ringing sumptuousness of the blue color, with the dense white light of the moon placed in the center, on the snow, under the belly of the horse, reaches here a magical depth and resonance, acquiring a strong inner suggestiveness that communicates, in the transfiguration of the dream, restlessness and sadness, immersed as it is in the poignant and melancholy tenderness of memory.

In his activity as a sculptor first and, therefore, as a painter, Modigliani has always expressed his passion for the figure without hesitation, never giving up portraying, throughout his short life, friends, poets, art dealers, occasional models. With exceptional ease and spontaneity he simultaneously translated the physiognomy of a face, the expression of the gaze, the state of mind, ignoring the laws of perspective and chiaroscuro. His gallery of portraits, never painted from memory but always with a model, has the immediacy and truth of a very personal diary, because the freedom of expression is always authentic and the fast execution, entrusted to the drawing, as subtle as in the tip of a pencil, but sharp and constructive.

In this Sack of '53, Burri's interest in the gaps that open in the frayed hemp weft is evident: stretch marks and holes are stitched up, highlighted by touches of color, patched up or even compensated with a contrasting silk insert. The symptoms of jute wear and the surfacing traces of faded writing appear as recomposed signs of an accumulation of existence, charging Burri's return to the Dadaist collage technique with drama. But, even in the comparison with the poor material of the sackcloth, the primary intent of the artist remains that of constructing an objective image, renewing the tradition of Abstractionism.

In 1963 Warhol definitively abandoned the technique of painting for the most congenial to his intentions of screen printing - more easily replicable and impersonal -, a choice that goes hand in hand with the launch of a new series of subjects inspired by death. The first of this cycle entitled Death and disaster is still hand painted, 129 Die in Jet (Cologne, Museum Ludwig), from 1962, a faithful reproduction of the first page of the "New York Mirror" of June 4 of that year, in which the plane crash in which 129 people perished was documented. This first work will be followed by scenes of road accidents, suicides, operating theaters, electric chairs, mug shots of criminals, weapons and skulls. The founding idea of the artistic operation - the extrapolation of a fragment of reality perceived within a different perimeter of values, the aesthetic one - claims Orange Car Crash: it takes up a piece of life - albeit of a second passage - through the yet another photograph of a car accident in 1959, published by United Press International Corporation. Repeating an image on the canvas several times, with generally very lively backgrounds such as the colors of advertising language, Warhol generates a sort of visual addiction and consequently the dramatic emptying of the sequence, almost an antidote to the strong emotions of existence.

At the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, Morandi's attention was increasingly focused on a few issues. In fact, the object becomes a means for the artist, a pretext for exploring the deepest reasons for painting. As can be assessed by observing this still life, in the Morandian research of these years the spatial connotation becomes essential. The laying surface of the objects often coincides with the infinite line of the horizon. This transforms the space into an increasingly indefinite and mental entity. The light, clear and diffused, envelops things in a suspended atmosphere, as if they and the shadows are progressively reduced until they disappear or, regardless of the physical laws, become spots of color of the same consistency as the objects. A further source of estrangement is sometimes determined by the relational value that is established between objects. Morandi subverts, in fact, the normal mechanism of vision, and the objects at the bottom loom over the foreground, going beyond a plausible scan based on near / far coordinates. The depth can only be hinted at by a slender oblique line that marks the laying surface or by the color, in which "the subdued murmuring of grays, whites and ivories" (Marilena Pasquali) can be shattered by the almost timbral assonances of the oranges, pinks and blues. From then on, the concept of series emerges in Morandi's operative procedure, which implies the repetition of the same subject, so that in the repetition the artist's attention is focused on those sensitive differences in tone, light, point of view, of size.

Always with a strongly self-celebratory intent, Salvo aspires, in the early seventies, to compete with the great masters of painting, obviously on the basis of a peer comparison. (...) Tracing the evolution of painting over the last seven centuries, by Simone Martini in Cézanne, passing through Stephan Lochner, Cranach, Rembradt and Boucher, Salvo's canvas ideally closed the path as a standard bearer of twentieth-century painting. Typical of that turn of years, even in this canvas the artist plays with the quotation of tradition, loading the iconography, now historicized, with a studied realization awkwardness in an ironic sense, in a sort of artistic tampering with aesthetic values assimilated to the history of style and presented in a renewed form. The model is the "San Martino divides the cloak with a beggar" by El Greco, ostentatiously counterfeited for the recontextualized scene and the replacement of the dark tones of the original with luminous tones and fragrant colors, in a reinterpretation that smacks of almost outrageous re-appropriation of a well-known piece of history of Western figurative culture. The conceptual approach of the painting, starting from the rejection of a consolidated creative practice, is further underlined by the replacement of the face of San Martino with that of the painter's wife dressed in the old fashioned way, in a work that intercepts at the same time ancient painting, pre-Raphaelites, pop art and conceptual art. Seven centuries of art history in fact.

Mummified culture was exhibited during one of the most controversial Venice Biennials, that of 1972, marked by the stir around the "Second solution of immortality" by Gino De Dominicis. Mattiacci participated with four works: "Primary Alphabets" (1972), twelve cast aluminum stelae reproducing imaginary lost alphabets; "Planisphere with time zones" (1972), seven clocks fixed to the wall; "Total Project" (1972), consisting of a real working telephone accompanied by a series of international telephone directories, and the work in the GAM collection "Cultura mummifiata" , artfully disordered accumulation of one hundred casts of cast aluminum books, already presented in Rome at the beginning of the year together with Primary Alphabets. Four works on the cultural codes at the basis of our learning: the alphabet and the clock, which determine language and time, the telephone, capable of modifying our perception of communication and physical distance and finally books, safes of knowledge, history, archive of Western society. The disorder of the volumes, placed on the ground in an uneven heap, some of them balanced, resting on top of others in a vertical position, is only apparent: they are immobile, fixed, "mummified". Mattiacci constructs a conceptual image that reflects on culture as a convention, on the risk of closure and the static nature of knowledge, managing to maintain a clear and evocative gaze.

Tracing the origins of Marisa Merz's work is a bit like crossing a boundless territory in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to find certain points of reference or establish boundaries. In the first phase of his work he created installations, mostly of large dimensions, while from the 1980s onwards he preferred small sculptures and works on paper made in pencil and sometimes in pastel and mixed techniques. For his sculptures, he uses ancestral techniques and mainly linked to the female world, such as knitting, which contrasts with the use of unusual or technological materials but always ductile and easily malleable, such as, and it is the case of this work, the aluminum sheet or the copper wire. Living Sculpture is part of the very first works created by the artist in 1966 and exhibited in the gallery of Gian Enzo Sperone the following year: the sheet was cut into strips and assembled with a simple stapler to form tubular shapes of various sizes, collected in groups, they descended from the ceiling without a predetermined order. These works that suggest organic forms borrowed from the animal or plant world, become the metaphor of an endless image; works that could go on indefinitely, multiplying their shape in space, expanding their perception with a play of reflections of light and of shadows caused by the shiny and curved surface of the sheet metal and by modifying its architectural structure.

Klein created several monochrome paintings to focus on a single color, a particular point of blue. He wanted to obtain a saturated and bright color, without any alteration, that was extra-dimensional and able to represent all the primary elements of the universe, in particular the opposition of water and fire. Klein sought a solvent capable of fixing the pure powder pigment to the support and patented the ultramarine dye under the name of International Blue Klein. From 1959 he went from monochrome to the use of a trilogy of colors consisting of blue, gold and magenta. These three shades have a strong symbolic charge that allows the work to be an echo of the immaterial, to make the invisible visible: the artistic product is closely linked to reality and nature, but at the same time is endowed with the spirituality necessary to intuit the evanescent and immortal beyond. In keeping with the Nouveau Réalisme movement, of which the artist himself is one of the founders, in 1960 Klein elaborated a new form of appropriation of contemporary reality that found results in his art with the creation of plastic works. Portrait Relief of Arman and Portrait Relief of Claude Pascal are placed in this period of turning point and completeness of his artistic career. Both portraits of his friends and associates evoke images of religious plastic icons: from representations of Christ, saints and martyrs, to funerary monuments deriving from classical and Roman art.

"I'm interested in painting. My stains are painting, but not as a sensitivity: they are a weight, a physical fact, the weight of a gesture that requires maximum concentration. For me it remains a problem of painting: in its essence. he watches them accept them dynamically, as energy, as an action. Painting, painting is a form of discontinuity, focuses attention on a moment that detaches the gesture, the action from the undifferentiated space. Concentration, discontinuity it cancels the space and invents its own different, discontinuous space, in turn. " Gastini's spots appear for the first time in his work in the years 1969 - 1970 and give the artist's research new sources and capacity for development. "My work forces the other space to free itself". That space that is beyond the viewer's point of view and that the distribution of the spots, completely random, forces to reveal itself.

Hermaesthetics is a term invented by the artist that originates from herm, the truncated-conical pillar bearing the head of a divinity, used in ancient Greece to indicate the roads to Athens and later, in Roman times, in celebratory portraiture. In this case, the title of the work helps to reveal its hidden meaning, in which the artist, playing as usual with linguistic manipulations, refers to the free and casual associations of Dadaism, recalled here by the dice, symbol of the unpredictability of fate, which hangs on the figure's head. Reference is also made to the Androgyne of the myth told by Plato in the Symposium - where the origin of humanity was traced to three species of human beings: the male, the female and a third specimen with both genders - and to Hermes, the Mercury of the Romans, who was not originally a god, but the personification of the totemic virtues of a phallic simulacrum. This one, best known for his role as messenger of the gods, is generally represented with winged shoes, helmet and caduceus, and he was also associated with scientific spirit and artistic sensitivity. Finally, there is a reference to Hermes Trimegistus ("three sometimes wise "), traditionally depicted with three heads, from which the term" hermeticism "comes, that is the initiatory knowledge that can be reached with study and dedication.

From the mid-sixties the work of Giovanni Anselmo has ceased to be a representation of something within the finite limits of the canvas, whether it be a drawing or a painting. The artist no longer delivers his work to the public, as if it were definitively coming out of himself, he abandons the canvas as a place for pictorial representation and transforms it into a continuous experience, communicating the sense of action in the time of the work. Anselmo makes full use of the canvas and its frame. The colors, that is the stone, operate both in a chromatic sense on the surface and really on it. The stones seem to be placed by chance astride the canvas, while they act and keep themselves in balance clinging to the frame through a loop made with the steel cable, consuming the frame itself moment by moment. In this way a situation of energy is determined, similarly to what happens in the works with the magnetic needle: purely physical in this case, but always projected towards infinity, the one suggested by the white painted canvas, sum of all colors, no longer place of a representation but of all possible representations.

The reflection on the primary linguistic structures of painting accompanies Giulio Paolini's beginnings; from "Disegno geometrical" of 1960, in which the squaring of the canvas is not the subject of the painting, but is rather aimed at qualifying the support, to the immediately following "Untitled", the artist intends to carry out a recognition of the constituent elements of the framework. The linguistic perspective, in which canvas, frame, frame, line and color become the concrete tools of an empirical attitude, already in the early stages of activity, is accompanied by a semantic and syntactic, determined to derive the scope of the intervention from material qualities of the chosen media. The "Untitled" of 1966, at the center of which the perimeter of a white square is crossed by a slight stroke of pencil, shows itself as a metalinguistic artifice, construction of the picture within the picture; the painted surface, in fact, mimics the space occupied by the rough canvas on the wall and plays with the transparency of the fabric, revealing how the wooden planks that make up the cross of the frame condition the profile of the geometric figure. The equivocal relationship between the subject of the work and its physical support is considerably complicated if interpreted in a wider dimension, such as to include the surrounding space and the viewer. The sense of disorientation produced by the alternation of fictitious and real plans is the result of an aesthetic trap that, experienced above all in the two-year period 1964 - 1965 and perfected, in that turn of years, with the introduction of the photographic technique, founds its own ambiguity on the duplication of the square.

Presented in Boetti's debut exhibition at the Christian Stein gallery in Turin in 1967, the work was placed with absolute autonomy in the context of other works equally independent and closed in on themselves. To the choice of an elementary material, Boetti matches an equally simple shape, able to visualize the thrust caused inside the roll by the action of winding the cardboard on itself. The lack of internal relations and metaphorical references guaranteeing this and other works by Boetti of 1966-1967, committed only to manifesting their existence, can be counted among the first texts of Arte Povera.

From the visual sensations of a bright day e

Brilliant and refined painter from Ferrara, Boldini was one of the most acute interpreters of the elegant and sensual atmosphere of the Belle Époque, which from Paris, the privileged theater of international cultural experiences, expanded into the frenetic cosmopolitan capitals of Europe and the refined environments of Italian cities. he moved to Paris, living in the Ville lumière in the period of maximum splendor, frequenting the best bourgeois circles and thus becoming the interpreter of worldly life, capable as he was of inventing wonderful portraits of the most fashionable personalities of the time. . Together with Sargent, an American painter, he was considered towards the end of the century the most fashionable painter in Paris, capable of fixing the grace and elegance of the snobbish society of the time, making a realistic portrait of bourgeois life. Portrait of a lady, where he portrays a charming woman with an unknown identity with an elegant hairstyle, in an image played on golden and black tones, as if to recall the Spanish portraitists of the seventeenth century, as he already did in the Portrait of Madame Veil -Picard of 1897 (private collection). In 1880, during a trip to Holland, he met the painting of Frans Hals, whose technical speed of touch greatly impressed the Ferrara artist, so much so that towards the end of that decade he oriented himself towards a painting with increasingly rapid brushstrokes, in a synthesis of the gesture that will become a characteristic feature of his art. This dynamism of the stroke led his painting to a dematerialization effect of the figure, which lost its outlines, to focus on a well-defined part: usually this effect was applied in a descending way; from the face, more defined, the clothes were lost in the darting speed of the stroke. In fact, note how even in the Portrait of a Lady the evanescent effect is applied to the elegant dress of the woman, which is only hinted at.

It is an unfinished study of the painting now in the Racconigi castle. The work can be dated on the basis of a letter from d'Azeglio to his brother Roberto dated 24 March 1823: "I made a painting, finished only a few days ago, of Leonidas' death; it represents the moment in which he falls defended by a few of the his survivors, on one side the army of Xerxes who pursue, on the other the Thermopylae ..., in the background the Artemisio bosom with boats, triremes, fires, tents ... "In advance of the more famous Montmorency, the painting proposed the encounter between landscape painting and subjects inspired by historical episodes. The link with the contemporary Roman neoclassical artistic environment is more pronounced than in Montmorency, in particular in the meticulous definition of the plant elements and in the razor-sharp scanning of the planes. The final draft will give a different interpretation both of the landscape (enlarged on the view of the gulf and softened in a diffused light), and of the clash, fragmented in various duels.

"The siren" was painted by Sartorio following his first stay in London and is strongly influenced by the example of English Pre-Raphaelite painting. Back in Italy, the work was also reproduced on the "illustrated tribune", accompanied by some verses by Diego Angeli, and received the applause of contemporary critics. The composition with a deep horizontal cut is built around the figure of the sinuous mermaid with long red hair and diaphanous skin that surrounds the body of the young fisherman who leans out of the boat. The skulls, visible in transparency on the seabed behind the woman, suggest the end that awaits the young victim in the arms of the charmer. The mythological theme of the mermaid, usual in mythological painting, is addressed by Sartorio influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite and English symbolism that he had been able to study during his stay in London in 1893 - 1894.

Ginia, known by Spazzapan in 1932 - 1933, is the model of numerous drawings and paintings: this one, among the first executed, is a two-dimensional effect image of simple and firm setting. The large surfaces of the body are defined by quickly sketched dark lines that recall the vigor and smoothness of the stroke in the ink drawings by Spazzapan of the years 1929 - 1930. In the synthesis of the forms and in the chromatic accords there is an interest in Matissian painting that it becomes more explicit in later paintings.

The gaze of a very young Mario Sturani fixes the viewer with a determined look, reflecting the passions and vast cultural interests of a promising yet complex artist. [...] The passion for animals and nature is already evident in the "Self-portrait with jay feather", executed around 1928 and dedicated to his friend Celestino Durando, where the black and white feather is "rendered with attention to camouflage in the its immediacy as a find from the author's naturalistic collection ". The alternation of the two colors of the feather could represent an exhibited metaphor of dark and bright days, with a reference to the contemporary literary efforts of Sturani intent on writing an autobiographical novel entitled Il bruno e l'azzurro. The stylistic choice of the unfinished, already experimented in another self-portrait of 1927, and the graphic nervousness of the pencil stroke emphasize the few parts detected with oil colors, especially the penetrating gaze and the contrast of the white collar on the intense blue of the dress, while the background is covered with a quick brushstroke of thin color. In the angular features of the face emerges the taste close to the Viennese secession that Sturani had acquired from the Dalmatian Ugo Zovetti, a significant element of the vastness of cultural contributions meditated by the Turin artist.

In the years immediately following the First World War, Sironi focused on the representation of the metropolitan landscape, portraying the Milanese suburbs in a number of drawings, sketches and oil paintings. The studies of architecture, first at the technical schools of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome then at the engineering faculty always in the capital, constantly nourished and constituted the backbone of his poetics almost throughout the period of his activity, a poetics resolved in a meditated and rational vision made of monumentality, lights and shadows as intense as they are austere. Fields of color between a wide scale of grays and ochres - and only rarely light brushstrokes of white to "illuminate" the landscape - create that leaden and rarefied atmosphere that distinguishes these subjects. The suburban neighborhoods that grew out of all proportion in the years between 1900 and 1915 are rarely inhabited by human beings, whose presence is instead recalled through trams and trucks, thus approaching the all-Italian tradition of a synthetic representation that accentuates the volumes. The myth of architecture pervades all of his pictorial work: therefore, in his urban landscapes created starting from the early twenties, the composition is meditated on a clear geometry of the streets and on the volumes, so clearly closed, of the buildings, whether condominiums or industrial buildings.

The work is part of an important series of abstract works begun by the painter in France in the years after World War II. Performed with an essentially gestural and graphic technique of lucid compositional synthesis, and at the same time of extreme spiritual weighting, the canvas represents a good example of the highest production of the German artist. Hartung, who always charges the dense texture of his pictorial graphics with spatial lyricism, expresses himself here with absolute stylistic coherence and chromatic subtlety, vibrant with sensitivity and harmony between sign, gesture and color. In the composition T. 50-5 the relationship between graphic improvisation and pictorial fabric is substantiated - according to the author's intent - in a total experience of reality. On a background prepared to receive them he draws vibrant, incisive, dry and sharp traces, full of emotions, already recurrent in the ink drawings of youth.

Since 1953 the artistic production of Antoni Tàpies has definitely turned direction focusing on the problematic of matter. Consequently we are witnessing the reduction of the chromatic alphabet to a few colors, to the advantage of the material consistency of the pigs works that begin to take on the appearance of crumbly and peeling walls, bearing the imprint of the slow but relentless work of time, to which it accompanies a code of light signs, antithetical to the rough tactile exuberance of the material. As usual in those years, "Painting no XLV" proposes in the consequent title the author's intention to free himself from any descriptive temptation, while in other works the title of the work is simply given by the materials used. Content more than framed by the frame, which in addition to taking up the black recalls the idea of an older and aged object of which only the golden decorations at the corners remain, the painting lives on the ambiguous fusion of the dark background created with Spanish painting, starting from the backgrounds of the seventeenth-century still lifes, passing through the black paintings of goya, up to the dramatic Picassian evocations of the war. To tear the gloomy veil of the composition is the emergence in the lower part of the canvas of the rough sandy concretion: the revenge of materiality with its immanence on the transcendence of color.

In the last years of his life, Licini simplifies the baggage of forms that distinguishes his work and brings the palette back to colors close to the fundamental ones, basing the compositions on contrasts of complementaries. The present painting fits into this precise context, denoting an extreme exemplification of lines and colors.

It is the portrait of the mother Annetta Treves, comparable for the frontal position, for the elongation of the figure and the brightness of the face represented with essential features, for the oblique cut of the eyes, to the Figure exhibited at the Roman Quadrennial of 1931; Ragghianti will identify, in 1948, a certain reworking of Modigliani's experience.

The brushstrokes of dense and pasty pictorial matter applied energetically and the strong luminous contrasts evoke on the one hand the constructivism of Cézanne and the experiences of Derain, on the other hand they are connected to Sironi's contemporary research on painting as a "constructive force". The resulting sense of monumentality suggests the artist's next orientation in the field of architectural decoration.

In 1937 Cagli was commissioned to decorate the vestibule of the Italian pavilion at the Paris International Exposition with panels celebrating Rome since its foundation and the great Italians. The artist, with the help of Afro, creates over 200 square meters of panel painted in tempera and covered with a hand of boiling virgin wax, according to the ancient Pompeian hipusto technique. But the absolute freedom and lack of rhetoric with which Cagli interprets the subject provoke the harsh reaction of the orthodox criticism and the fascist regime which ordered the destruction of the panels, in fact carried out only minimally. In 1936 - 1937 the Roman climate had become heavy for the artist: the incipient anti-Semitic campaign had attacked him, together with the intellectuals belonging to the Galleria della Cometa, accused of defeatism and subversivism. In Paris, therefore, Cagli presents a world at sunset. The great characters, enclosed in delimited spaces like theatrical scenes and characterized by evanescent bodies and absent or bewildered expressions, emerge from the late - ancient age of decadence, a metaphor for a completely modern melancholy and existential suffering. The chromatic material, clear and sunny, in the early Thirties, is charged with a brown - blackish background. The panel exhibited here comes from the Casa Serena in Turin where the following are currently kept: Romulus, Imperatori, Colleoni, Characters of the Rianscimento, Machiavelli.