From 22 July to 26 November 2023 Palazzo delle Paure hosts the exhibition "Novecento. The return to figuration from Sironi to Guttuso"

The exhibition cycle of Percorsi nel Novecento continues in Lecco, a program conceived by the Directorate of the Lecco Urban Museum System and entrusted for its design and construction to ViDi Cultural which, until November 2024, will analyze the Italian cultural scene of the twentieth century. The new chapter of this narrative, after the review that explored the futurist universe, is scheduled at the Palazzo delle Paure, from 22 July to 26 November 2023, with NOVECENTO. The return to figuration from Sironi to Guttuso.

The exhibition, curated by Simona Bartolena, produced and created by ViDi cultural, in collaboration with the Municipality of Lecco and the Lecco Urban Museum System, Trenord travel partner, presents over 60 works by artists such as Mario Sironi, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Felice Casorati, Arturo Martini, Giacomo Manzù, Mario Mafai, Renato Guttuso and many others who, in the period between the two wars, supported the "Return to order", or the reference to figuration without denying the spirit of the avant-gardes of the beginning of the century by which they had been advocates. Like the other exhibitions of the Palazzo delle Paure project, the exhibition will be accompanied by an important didactic-narrative apparatus, with historical notes, information and explanations with a popular slant.

The "Return to order" represented a desire common to most of the cultural environments of the first post-war period, which screamed the need to return to the canons consecrated by tradition, without losing sight of the avant-garde spirit and cultural renewal promoted by previous generations .

In Italy, this challenge was taken up by Margherita Sarfatti who founded the Novecento Italiano movement which included Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi, Mario Sironi, united by the desire to represent an era with their painting and to recover the style of the great masters of the past. Other authors such as Felice Casorati, Massimo Campigli, Filippo de Pisis, Giorgio Morandi gravitated around the Novecento group who, while espousing the same ideals, never fully adhered to them.

Particularly suggestive is the room dedicated to Mario Sironi with works that well represent the artist's style in the period under examination. But there are other masterpieces on show, such as a rare landscape by Giorgio Morandi or the equally extraordinary Ruins painted by Afro in the 1930s.

A particular role is occupied by the so-called Magical Realism, more European in scope, which starting from the recovery of classical expressive stylistic features, nevertheless becomes the expression of an emotional tension far removed from the exhibited monumentality and solemnity of so much twentieth-century painting. Alongside the works referable to Magical Realism, various possible dreamlike and visionary declinations of life painting are also investigated, from surrealist episodes to metaphysical legacies still visible in some works.

The review closes ideally with a survey of those authors who stood in opposition, even political, to official art, from the Corrente group in Milan to the Roman School of via Cavour.

Alongside the great names of the time, the exhibition also offers, as usual, paintings and sculptures by lesser-known artists, which will surprise visitors. Consisting almost exclusively of works from private collections (with the exception of important loans from the Museo della Permanente in Milan and the BPM collection), the exhibition offers the opportunity to admire rarely exhibited works, sometimes offered to the public for the first time .