From April 17 in the splendid setting of the Reggia di Venaria with posters, paintings, sculptures, furniture and ceramics, the exhibition will arrive that tells the extraordinary artistic flowering that overwhelmed and changed the taste between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Architecture, painting, furniture, sculpture, music are invaded by references to nature, the vegetable world and a new image of the female figure : in Turin it is the time of Art Nouveau that drives away academic rules and tradition from everywhere. Considered as an international current, it is based on the break with nineteenth-century eclecticism and historicism and represents the modern response to an increasingly industrialized society. Conceived as a total art, the Modern Style becomes Tiffany in the United States , Jugendstil in Germany , Sezession in Austria , Nieuwe Kunst in the Netherlands , Liberty in Italy, Modernism in Spain and quickly establishes itself in England, home of the greatest theorists of the movement, and passes under the name of Art Nouveau in France .
It was presented in Turin in 1902 with the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art and gave way to Liberty in Italy starting from the city, which was expanding at the time. It does not impose any obligation: it is the art of freedom that frees itself from conventions. The forms of academicism are broken in front of a transgressive style that makes eroticism, naturalism and exoticism its cardinal points. No rule can no longer be a brake for those artists, especially in France, who share a love for arabesque and references to the sensuality of nature and the female body: Emile Gallé, Daum Frères, Alphonse Mucha, Louis Majorelle, René Lalique , Eugène Grasset, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugène Gaillard are just some of the artists on display - with a corpus of 200 works from the Arwas Archives, the Arte Nova Foundation, the Rodolfo Caglia Collection and other private loans - to tell how the 'Art Nouveau stood out for its new and decidedly modern style, with visionary creations, with the intensive use of curved lines and arabesque. Thanks to an innovative setting that recreates the atmosphere and taste of the time, the reproduction of the living environments of early twentieth century Paris is proposed to illustrate everyday life. The path then also concerns the story of the reflection on the decorative arts of a small elite of architects, artists and intellectuals who started the Liberty season in Italy and in Turin in particular.