La notte

Mitchell Wolfson Jr. 2007 Genova

GX1993.209.209

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 54; Larghezza: 80; Profondità: 40

Esposizione Internazionale - Roma, Piazza d’Armi - 1911<br>Biennale Internazionale delle Arti Decorative - Monza, Villa Reale - 19/05/1925 - 20/10/1925

The Latium countryside, with its "intense malia formed of primordial dreams, sadness and abandonment", was one of the main sources of inspiration for Duilio Cambellotti's multifaceted artistic experience. His cabinet "La notte" (The Night), exhibited in the "Room of the Inhabitants of the Roman Countryside" at the 1925 International Biennial in Monza, was the most emblematic work of his archaic aesthetic and cultural imagination. In a close dialectic between vernacular experiences, avant-garde experimentation and classical citations, Art Deco research was in fact expressed through a common tendency towards formal simplification and compositional rigour. Cambelotti's idealisation of the Roman countryside is expressed in his furniture production that echoes authentic models of rural tradition. This tendency was also seen at the 1911 international exhibition in Rome, with his installation for the Capanna dell'Agro Romano, where ethnographic documents and furniture made by farmers were exhibited. He also had a fundamental influence on the artistic training of his ceramic students, from Romeo Berardi to Roberto Rosati, from Renato Bassanelli to Melchiorre Melis.

Margherita di Savoia

Mitchell Wolfson Jr. 2007 Genova

87.1066.6.1

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 49; Larghezza: 49.5; Profondità: 20

In 1900 Margaret of Savoy passed the age of fifty; from 11 August 1900 she had to take on the role of Queen Mother, but for everyone she remained the first Queen of Italy since her husband Umberto became king in January 1878, succeeding his father Victor Emmanuel II.
Of conservative ideas, sympathising with Mussolini in the last years of her life, which ended in Bordighera on 4 January 1926, Margherita was one of the most popular characters of the House of Savoy from as far back as 1868 when, barely seventeen years old, she married the heir to the throne. Instinctively communicative, deeply convinced of the importance of her role, she contributed to the prestige of the Savoy dynasty and, in particular, to making it one of the identity and unifying symbols of the newly constituted nation. A painter for pleasure, a music lover, a friend of artists, writers and poets, including the republican Carducci, she was the animator of a famous cultural ‘club’ in the capital and an assiduous visitor to exhibitions. Margherita was always behind the purchases that her husband and son made at the most important exhibitions of the time, and the Venice Biennale, the first edition of which was held in 1895, had been instituted two years earlier by the lagoon municipality precisely to celebrate the royal couple's 25th wedding anniversary.

La cena dei rimasti

Mitchell Wolfson Jr. 2007 Genova

GD1993.46.1

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 185.5; Larghezza: 200

The muffled atmosphere of a modest rural interior; the crystallised immobility of the characters on stage and a chilled incommunicability between them, which the looming melancholic snowy landscape helps to emphasise. The horror of war can also be described through the disturbing negative charge of absence: that of the young father, perhaps still at the front, but whose death has more likely already been announced. Potente's large painting, exhibited in 1924 at the 14th International Biennial Art Exhibition in Venice, appears pervaded by an evocative atmosphere of timeless suspension, common to the research of Magic Realism and here exemplified by a depiction of the mother with child inspired by the maternities of 14th-15th century Italian painting. In this work, however, the expressive short-circuit between the prosaic ambience and the lyrical scenic transfiguration of the characters helps to highlight the pain of the ‘’ those left behind‘’, petrified victims of the tragedy of war.

Sculpture

Sculpture

Painting

Painting

Painting

Painting

Painting