Exhibition curated by Barbara Guidi with the collaboration of Virginia Hil

In July 1931, on the occasion of the first retrospective staged in Paris, «Vogue» dedicated to Boldini, who had died only a few months earlier, an article with an emblematic title: Giovanni Boldini. Painter of elegance . At the moment when the portraitist who for decades had been the arbiter of Parisian taste left the scene, the myth of an artist began who, having created a canon of beauty and modern and disruptive style, would have inspired generations of stylists, from Christian Dior to Giorgio Armani, from Alexander McQueen to John Galliano.

The magnetism of Boldini 's portraits, in which his models appear worldly, sure of themselves and of their power of seduction, owes much to the relationship that the painter had with the nascent industry of charm and celebrity to which, in turn, he gave a notable contribution. The exhibition Boldini and fashion will tell for the first time the story of this fascinating bond: the result of a long study that through the documents has allowed the reconstruction of the dense network of social and professional relationships of the artist, the exhibition will show how Boldini was capable of being an interpreter of the fashion of the time to the point of influencing its choices, like a contemporary trendsetter.

Established in Paris between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a crossroads of every trend of taste and modernity, Boldini immortalized the voluptuous elegance of the cosmopolitan elites of the Belle Époque. His talented brush has delivered to posterity the images of the protagonists of that mythical era, helping to make them real glamor icons.

Initially grasped for its being the quintessence of modern life, an element that anchors the work to contemporaneity, fashion - understood as a dress, accessory, but also a sophisticated expression that transforms the body into a place of desire - soon becomes an essential and distinctive attribute of his portraiture. Thanks to a painting that combines a nervous and dynamic brushstroke with the emphasis of mannered and sensual poses aimed at enhancing both the silhouettes of the models and the lines of their clothes, Boldini gives life to a personal declination of the portrait of society that becomes a real and own canon, a model of style and trend that anticipates formulas and languages of cinema and fashion photography of the twentieth century.

An evocative journey consisting of over one hundred works will therefore combine splendid paintings, drawings and engravings by Boldini and his colleagues Degas, Manet, Sargent, Whistler, Seurat, Blanche and Helleu with wonderful period clothes, books and precious objects. Arranged into thematic sections, each sponsored by writers who have contributed to making fashion a fundamental element of the poetics of modernity, from Charles Baudelaire to Oscar Wilde, from Marcel Proust to Gabriele D'Annunzio, the exhibition will reveal the suggestive intertwining between art and fashion and literature that have marked the fin de siècle and, evoking the frame of worldliness, charm and refinement that was the background to Boldini's long career, will immerse the visitor in the refined and sparkling atmospheres of the French metropolis and in all its elegant hedonism.