The GAM of Turin dedicates an exhibition to Alberto Moravia curated by Luca Beatrice and Elena Loewenthal in the context of the project “Born to narrate. Rediscovering Alberto Moravia” which the Circolo dei Lettori foundation conceived and created with the GAM and the National Cinema Museum in collaboration with the Alberto Moravia Fund Association , Bompiani publisher and the Gallerie d'Italia.

The figure of Moravia, a great protagonist of artistic and intellectual life for a large part of the twentieth century, lends itself to a variety of suggestions which are at the heart of a wide-ranging review: painting, cinema, photography and of course literature.

 Among the many fields of interest that go beyond literature, that of the visual arts represents much more than a passion for Alberto Moravia. The first writings on art date from 1934 to arrive at 1990, the year of his death. He publishes in magazines and newspapers, including the Turin Gazzetta del Popolo and the Corriere della Sera , and writes catalog texts and prefaces for various artists. This interest derives in part from his family upbringing. His father was passionate about painting, his sister Adriana Pincherle , trained together with Mafai and Scipione, will be an artist of a certain stature in the Roman environment. Since the 1930s, but especially after the war, artists, writers, intellectuals frequent the same environment and the same places, exchanges are the order of the day. In several novels art appears in the meshes of the events and in some characters, such as the failed painter Dino and his modest and dated alter ego Balestrieri in La Boredom (1960).

In 2017 the Bompiani publishing house collected, in a precious volume, most of the writings on the art of Alberto Moravia, in which painting is the protagonist. From the 1930s to the 1950s Moravia followed Enrico Paulucci and Carlo Levi in the period of the Six, began the long partnership with Renato Guttuso which would last a lifetime, carefully observed the situation in Rome, from Giuseppe Capogrossi to Mario Mafai . In the following season, in Rome in the 1960s, the capital of international art, he repeatedly wrote about Mario Schifano , Giosetta Fioroni , Titina Maselli and the photographer Elisabetta Catalano to whom we owe one of the most intense portraits. She also loves Antonio Recalcati , Piero Guccione and Fabrizio Clerici.

The exhibition in the Wunderkammer space is proposed as an ideal collection of the artists that the writer esteemed and to whom he dedicated his pen and presents about 30 works from the Alberto Moravia House Museum in Rome as well as from private collections and from a conspicuous nucleus of paintings and drawings conserved at the GAM . What emerges is an interesting portrait of Italian art through literature, not always in line with the dominant trends or fashions. The works chosen for the exhibition are in fact flanked by fragments of texts taken mostly from the book by Alberto Moravia I don't know why I didn't do the painter edited by Alessandra Grandelis, Milan, Bompiani, 2017 from which the exhibition takes its title and which evoke the relationship of esteem and very often of friendship with the authors of the works presented.