After thirty-five years, Milan is once again celebrating the art of Felice Casorati with the exhibition coming to Palazzo Reale. Here is our interview with the curators
Paintings on canvas and wood, sculptures, graphic works from the symbolist period, sketches of sets for operas destined for the Teatro alla Scala: these are the protagonists of the major exhibition sponsored by the Municipality of Milan-Culture and produced by Palazzo Reale and Marsilio Arte in collaboration with the Casorati Archive, that opens on 15 February 2025. Here is our interview with the curators Giorgina Bertolino, Fernando Mazzocca and Francesco Poli, among the leading experts on Felice Casorati’s artistic philosophy.
How did Casorati’s existential geographies influence the definition of his artistic philosophy, especially during his early years?
Fernando Mazzocca: As recently emerged from his sister Giuseppina’s diaries, the Casorati family spent their first night on via Mazzini in Turin, in the building that was to become the artist’s famous home-studio and house his masterpieces, on 30 April 1919. The move from Verona had therefore not taken place in 1918 as previously believed.
It was as if Turin, that would see the painter’s definitive rise and which he would never leave, had been assigned to him by destiny. Casorati himself expressed this conviction in a conference held at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in 1953: “In this anti-tourist city, which I love for its mysterious, unobvious beauty, in this city that is enigmatic and unsettling like a kabala, which every day must be discovered and then rediscovered, in which the fog is brighter than the sun, in which appropriateness has never been forgotten and can never be forgotten, in this square and squared city, only in this city could my paintings be born!” It was as if the mysterious charm and geometric face of Turin were reflected in the magical and unsettling space of his paintings, at least in those enigmatic interiors, populated by figures deep in thought, dominated by silence, to which his identity and his fame were most closely tied.
But that’s not exactly how things were. When Casorati moved to Turin he was already thirty-six years old and had a notable career behind him. He had become one of the protagonists of Italian art, where he had carved out a truly original space for himself. An originality, claimed by himself and his critics as proud solitude, which would always determine his style and his fame. This attitude perhaps also derived from the fact that in his youth he must have felt uprooted, due to the constant relocations of his family, forced to follow his father, a career soldier, to the places he was assigned. Things began to calm down when, starting in 1895, the Casoratis seemed more stable in Padua. From then on, his existential geography was represented, and would be until his move to Turin, by the Veneto region. Padua, Verona, Venice were the setting for his training and his definitive rise.
His time in the Veneto region therefore contributed significantly to the evolution of Casorati’s artistic history.
Fernando Mazzocca: His beginnings trace their roots to Padua, when, as a student of a skilled local painter Giovanni Vianello, he took part in his first exhibition, together with Boccioni, Ugo Valeri and Mario Cavaglieri. The latter two were interpreters of an Art Nouveau style that was prevalent in the city of the Saint, where Casorati trained as well. But starting in 1903, his visits to the famous international Biennale Arte exhibitions in Venice were decisive, affording him the opportunity to update his ideas. His debut dates back to 1907, with the magical, unripe masterpiece Ritratto della sorella Elvira presented at the 1907 Biennale. From that point on he would be increasingly present on the Venetian stage, which became the training ground for his successes not just in this early period, but also, and perhaps even more so, once he was firmly established in Turin.
The fundamental relationship with Veneto, both Padua and Venice, was momentarily interrupted with the move to Naples at the end of 1907 (as always, following his family), where, as he wrote to Tersilla Guadagnini, his great confidante of those years, he had a “new large and beautiful studio”, with light that did not come “from above, but from a very large side window”. It was a “square” room, with a “very high and round ceiling”. It’s interesting that in recollecting it (I am referring to a conference held in 1943 at the University of Pisa where he spoke about his life) that place looked very different, without light, “with leaden walls and whose windows overlooked a narrow and sad courtyard”.
It seems that in Naples he felt, as he confided to his friend, “very alone… without support, without advice, without emulation”. He “almost never left the house”, he “never saw anyone”, becoming “truly a bear”. In fact, he was intolerant of the “sun of beautiful Naples” which, instead of exciting him, as happened to everyone, “blinded” him. In this “monastic solitude” there remained one consolation, that of being able to spend “a large part” of his time in Capodimonte, which he called an “extraordinary Museum”. Beginning with this fundamental experience, the great museums (like later, in 1909, the Uffizi were during a stay in Florence) would be the place where he could dialogue and engage with the old masters, who would always be an essential touchstone for him: from Bruegel to Leonardo, from Botticelli to Piero della Francesca.
Thus were born the first real masterpieces, like Le vecchie (inspired by the famous Parabola di ciechi admired in Capodimonte), sent to the Venice Biennale where it was purchased by the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome; like the delightful Bambine; like Le figlie dell’attrice, exhibited in Buenos Aires and purchased by the Argentine State; like the more ambitious Persone presented at the International Exhibition of Fine Arts, staged at the Museum in Valle Giulia in Rome to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Unification of Italy. It is the only painting from the Neapolitan years where the landscape, in which enigmatic female figures are inserted, recalls the light of those places, like that of the magnificent woods of the Royal Palace of Portici where he had gone many times ‒ something rare for him, as he always loved enclosed spaces ‒ to paint en plein air.
Is that when Casorati returned to Verona?
Fernando Mazzocca: Towards the middle of March 1911, he finally returned to Veneto, to his beloved Verona, where he would live until 1918, a time that would be remembered as “the most beautiful years of my youth”. A very happy period, on the creative front too. He described it as a city “of a fine and delicate beauty, made up of noble and exquisite things, precious and at the same time simple, like a grey pearl that shines softly”. Its ancient churches attracted him with their mysterious charm, which must have had an influence on a rediscovered inspiration and on the new horizons that were opening up for his painting, increasingly experimental and innovative. The masterpieces, created in the studio in Verona, “a very bright, elegant and pleasant ballroom”, caused a sensation at exhibitions in Venice and Rome, but also in Brussels and Buenos Aires. It was the beginning of a success at exhibitions that would characterize his entire career, making his paintings known throughout the world. These events were also an opportunity to put himself up to date and engage with the artists who had been seminal figures for him, like Klimt in an early phase and later Cézanne, since he was able to see their works in person.
It was between Verona and Turin that the decisive turning point emerged, marked by the creation of large tempera paintings like L’attesa, Ritratto di Maria Anna De Lisi, L’uomo delle botti and Mattino, with which he finally seemed to achieve that unmistakable signature style, later confirmed in 1922 by the epochal masterpiece that is Silvana Cenni.
A Turinese feel echoes throughout the works of the artist. How?
Fernando Mazzocca: His interiors with figures, dizzying in perspective, became the emblematic representation of an existential restlessness and a metaphysical anxiety that are not at all modern. But it was in Turin that these mysterious paintings, not understood by the public and critics, found extraordinary interpreters in exceptional intellectuals like Piero Gobetti and Lionello Venturi, followed later, during his long career, by other faithful friends such as Giacomo Debenedetti, Albino Galvano, Italo Cremona and Luigi Carluccio.
In his adopted city Casorati pursued an increasingly original and very personal path, between the stimulating family sphere animated by the presence of his English wife Daphne, also a painter, like his son Francesco would later be, and the Accademia Albertina where he taught. He found his great patron in the extraordinary entrepreneur Riccardo Gualino who, like a Renaissance prince, employed him not just as a painter, but also as a sculptor, decorator and designer of interiors.
Casorati’s connection to the Gualinos is one of the key points of the Milanese exhibition. Why was this relationship important and what effects did it have on the artist’s production?
Giorgina Bertolino: In the room dedicated to Casorati and Gualino we wanted to really capture the feel of what this extraordinary time in Turin (which the artist and patron were protagonists of) was like. Painting was intertwined with theatre, music, sculpture and dance, with refined and cosmopolitan culture and lifestyles. The relationship between Felice Casorati and Riccardo Gualino, a collector, entrepreneur and financier in the mould of international tycoons, began in 1922 with the commissioning of family portraits. Hung on a wall of the room in Palazzo Reale, those portraits (Cesarina, Riccardo, their son Renato), which today belong to three different collections, can be seen next to each other: courtly, inspired by ancient painting and at the same time highly modern. We put them back in their context, reconstructing fragments of the private theatre in the Gualino family home, designed by Casorati and the architect Alberto Sartoris, with three bas-reliefs made by the artist for the frieze that decorated the room and with Commedia, one of his sculptures for the proscenium. Finally, we recalled those who performed on that stage: the Russian dancer Raja Markman, foregrounded in a splendid tempera painting by Casorati from 1925, and the composer and musician Alfredo Casella, painted in 1926.
In the narrative of the anthological exhibition, this room captures a landscape, a world and, at the same time, speaks of an important chapter in Felice Casorati’s art, the beginning of his production of portraits, exhibited in the 1920s at the Venice Biennale and in the halls of museums across Europe and the United States, and his experience as an architect and designer. This aspect is explored in-depth in a section of the catalogue dedicated to the artist’s furnishings, with an essay by Davide Alaimo. It serves as an invitation to visit the exhibition, curated by the Casorati Archive, which will open in April in the premises of the Felice Casorati Studio Museum in Pavarolo, in the hills of Turin.
What perspectives and themes mark Casorati’s artistic maturity? And which works have you selected to tell the public about the last phase of his career?
Francesco Poli: After the fundamental season of plastic forms more directly inspired by the classical values of the great tradition of Italian art, towards the end of the 1920s Casorati’s research began to progressively evolve in a new direction. His painting tended to open up to a less coldly “metaphysical”, more “welcoming” dimension, less distant from everyday reality, thanks to an airy and vibrant vitalisation of chromatic atmospheres, and through a more synthetically expressive and deformed figuration of characters and objects, always however within a very controlled compositional logic.
Among the first important examples of the beginning of this turning point are works such as Aprile (1929-30) and Ragazze a Nervi (1930), luminous compositions of figures in interiors exhibited at the 1930 Venice Biennale, and presented here in the exhibition.
Also worth mentioning is Susanna or Conversazione platonica (1929), exhibited at the I Quadriennale in Rome in 1931, an extraordinary “anti-classical” version of the famous Conversazione from 1925. The comparison between the two paintings proposed here in Milan is extremely interesting.
But the masterpiece that most epitomises the new course of painting in the 1930s is undoubtedly the magnificent portrait of his wife, Daphne a Pavarolo, presented at the Venice Biennale in 1934. The serious, harmonious figure of his wife seated on a window sill, with the soft, sinuous slopes of the landscape in the background, is the emblematic image of the artist’s sentimental serenity, of the maturity of his painting that derives from an achieved balance between an inner psychological dimension and a meditated perception of external reality.
Daphne a Pavarolo, together with La Barca (1934) and Sorelle Pontorno (1937), brought together in a single section, are the main masterpieces of the decade. Other sections of the exhibition are dedicated to the various expressive elaborations of female figures and nudes; to the evolution of still life, a theme that has always been of central interest to the artist, in all its phases; and finally, also to Casorati’s activity as a set designer, with a significant selection of set sketches created for operas at the Teatro alla Scala.
Casorati was also a set designer, how did you choose to talk about this talent in the Palazzo Reale exhibition?
Giorgina Bertolino: In the room that closes the anthological exhibition, the fourteen tempera paintings with costumes and sketches for sets reconstruct a season of Felice Casorati’s activity as a set designer, with the work for the Teatro alla Scala. La follia di Orlando, Le baccanti, il Fidelio, L’amore stregone, Il principe di legno and then the music of Petrassi, Ghedini, Beethoven, De Falla and Bartók. The thread of the exhibition rewinds: the tempera, the lines, the flat application of colour of the young Casorati are back, music is back, the painter’s first love, his inseparable piano, on which, before designing the sets, he tested out and studied the works. Closing the anthological exhibition, the room is also a tribute to the Teatro alla Scala and to Milan, to the role that the city played in the artist’s career.
Interview by Arianna Testino
BIO
Giorgina Bertolino, after gaining a degree at the University of Turin, she developed her main areas of study in the field of twentieth-century art history. She is the author of the general catalogues of Felice Casorati (with F. Poli; 1997, 2004), Pinot Gallizio (edited by M.T. Roberto) and Nella Marchesini (2015). She has curated I mondi di Riccardo Gualino (with A. Bava; Turin, Musei Reali, 2019); Dalle bombe al museo 1942-1959 (with R. Passoni; Turin, GAM, 2016); Felice Casorati. Collezioni e mostre tra Europa e Americhe (Alba, Fondazione Ferrero, 2014).
Fernando Mazzocca, after graduating from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, he taught at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and the Università Statale in Milan. One of the leading specialists of the Neoclassical, nineteenth and early twentieth century, he has published numerous volumes and realised major exhibitions on movements and of a monographic nature held at leading Italian exhibition venues since 1978.
Francesco Poli, a graduate in philosophy from the University of Turin, he is an art historian and critic. He has taught History of Contemporary Art at the Brera Academy and Université Paris 8. He has published numerous essays on modern and contemporary art including: La Metafisica; Minimalismo, Arte Povera, Arte Concettuale; Il sistema dell’arte contemporanea; Arte moderna. Dal postimpressionismo all’informale; Arte contemporanea. Le ricerche internazionali dalla fine degli anni’50 ad oggi; La Scultura del Novecento; Mettere in scena l’arte contemporanea (with F. Bernardelli); Il pittore solitario. Seurat e la Parigi moderna; L’ironia è una cosa seria. Strategie dell’arte d’avanguardia e contemporanea. He writes for La Stampa and specialised magazines. He has also curated numerous exhibitions in museums, public and private spaces.
INFO
from 15 February to 29 June 2025
Casorati
PALAZZO REALE
Piazza del Duomo 12, Milan
https://www.palazzorealemilano.it/mostre/casorati
Image captions:
Felice Casorati, Annunciazione, 1927, oil on panel, 151 x 100 cm. Milan, private collection. Photo credit Giuseppe and Luciano Malcangi
Felice Casorati, Le sorelle Pontorno, 1937, oil on canvas, 162 x 129 cm. UniCredit Art Collection. Photo credit Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Felice Casorati, Tiro al bersaglio (or Tiro a segno), 1919, tempera on canvas, 130 x 120 cm. Turin, private collection. Photo credit Pino Dell’Aquila
Felice Casorati, Raja, 1924-1925, tempera on panel, 120 x 100 cm. Venice, private collection. Photo credit Matteo De Fina [cover photo]
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