Show pays tribute to Veneto's array of 20th-century artists

| Tue, 10/31/2006 - 05:24

A major new show devoted to Veneto and the individuals that shaped its art throughout the 20th century has opened in this northern Italian city.

The exhibition brings together pieces by 50 artists working in the northern region, outlining major trends throughout the 1900s.

Venezia '900 - da Boccioni a Vedova (Venice in the 1900s - From Boccioni To Vedova) starts with work by Umberto Boccioni, one of the fathers of Futurism.

According to organizers, a 1910 solo exhibit devoted to Boccioni marked a major turning-point in the region's approach to art, breaking with traditional techniques and paving the way for important contemporary developments.

This room includes a beautiful Impressionist-style rendering of Venice's Grand Canal as well as several portraits, from a formal painting of a lawyer, to an elderly woman garbed in black.

The next section looks at a group of young, upcoming artists whose work was showcased at the newly opened Ca Pesaro Museum, which staged a series of groundbreaking exhibits between 1908 and 1924.

The paintings here embrace a wide variety of styles by Felice Casorati, Umberto Moggioli, Vittorio Zecchin, Guido Cadorin and Teodoro Wolf Ferrari.

Gino Rossi's work is the focus of the third section. Art historians credit Rossi with introducing European Post-Impressionism to Venice and there is a broad-ranging selection of his work on display, including his seminal La Fanciulla del Fiore (Flower Girl).

'Portraits and Self-Portraits', the next room, brings together work by several different artists, including Filippo De Pisis, Luigi Tito, Gennaro Favai, Pio Semeghini, Guido Cadorin and Umberto Martina.

The fifth section is devoted entirely to paintings by Filippo de Pisis, a prominent figure in Venice although less well known elsewhere.

The following room is entitled Magical Realism, with key paintings from a movement that surfaced during the inter-war period and was characterized by highly realistic paintings with unexpected twists.

'International Presences' showcases work by leading foreign and Italian artists whose work appeared in Venice's Biennials. Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, George Braque and Amedeo Mogigliani are among those featured.

The eighth section offers a taste of several key trends in the Veneto art world between 1944 and 1960, with paintings from the Abstract, Spatialist and Fronte Nuovo movements.

The next room presents various cityscape of Venice, as seen by different artists throughout the course of the century, and the exhibit wraps up with a room devoted entirely to Emilio Vedova, the patriarch of Venetian Abstractionism who died earlier this month.

The exhibition runs in Treviso's Ca' dei Carraresi until April.

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