Collateral exhibitions

The Musicians by Gianni Maimeri

A selection of musicians’ drawings from Stravinskij to Toscanini

By Paolo Manazza

The musicians by Gianni Maimeri were at first exhibited in 1931 at the memorable Pesaro Gallery (“Mostra dei pittori Giovanni Lentini e Gianni Maimeri”, Milano, Galleria Pesaro, April-May 1931, catalogue by Gustavo Botta).
The drawings ( a selection of about 10 items from nr 113 to 126) were shown together with 96 paintings in the rooms of the well-known gallery in Milan with the title “Gesti e atteggiamenti di musicisti. Studi a memoria (1927-28)”. The exhibition was warmly welcomed by people and press.
Afterwards the collection, enriched a lot, was offered to people in Milan in December 1948 on an artist’s one-man show at Galleria Salvetti, with a catalogue by Gustavo Predaval. In that occasion the collection was entitled : “I disegni di concertisti da Busoni a Toscanini (1905-1946)”.
Later on , forty-four years went by to a new exhibition of Musicians’ Collection, in 1992.
In October 1992 the Museum Teatro alla Scala devoted to Gianni Maimeri’s Musicians a broad exhibition by Giampero Tintori, museum manager, along with a full catalogue by Antea with commentaries by Tintori himself and by the critic Raffaele De Grada (“I musicisti visti da Gianni Maimeri”, a cura di Graziella Buccellati, Milano, Museo Teatrale alla Scala, 1-31 ottobre 1992). (more…)

midip 23 Jul 2016 Collateral exhibitions 0 Comment Leggi tutto

Aurelio Amendola – The art faces

22 excellent portraits of artists of XX century

by Walter Guadagnini

Aurelio Amendola (Pistoia 1938) is a leading protagonist of art photograph: during 40 years ,he made and explained pictures of works of the greatest masters of Classicism, from Donatello to Michelangelo, from Giovanni Pisano to Canova and he portrayed the most important artists in the XX century, from Dechirico to Burri, from Warhol to Lichtenstein, from Marino to Paladino and Ceroli.
Amendola’s classicism has been celebrated in exbhitions in museums all over the world. Two at least are worthy of memory : the one at Ermitage in San Pietroburgo , dedicated to the pictures on Michelangelo’s works and that of this year at Uffizi in Florence, devoted to Warhol’s portraits.
In his making photographs, the dialectics between documentation and interpretation takes the ancient as a model, starting from Pistoia where he was born to come to Florence and Rome where Michelangelo worked, on a basis of professional and manual skill that aims and aims to the topic’s understanding and not to the artist’s ability.
Amendola takes this attitude in the contemporary art too, always letting the subject dominate, whether it is the artist’s figure, his work , the place of his work or, as often occurs, the three altogether.
As the photographer himself said:’It is obvious that taking pictures of artists is a way to know them, to spend time with extraordinary people. I became a friend of all the artists I photographed, it is not a job for me, it is a great passion that let me feel alive. For this reason, making pictures of an ancient sculpture means to try and put in the matter the life I find in my contemporaries, making sculptures alive is something like meeting Michelangelo, Donatello. It is different with living artists, here we need to consider their requirements and keep at the same time own’s expressive independence.’
The here and now selection is a concise gallery of art portraits of XX century, where the photoprapher’s ability to catch the main features of subjects and their art is easy to recognize and, at the same time, it is possible to see the changing in customs, in the very figure of the artist in the world.

midip 22 Jul 2016 Collateral exhibitions 0 Comment Leggi tutto

Portraits at Palazzo Belgioioso

When artists paint artists – palazzo Belgioioso

by Massimo Pulini

Palazzo Belgioioso in Milan, in the Risorgimento years, used to host a group of artists that, according to their own statute, were going to add to the walls the portrait of each new group participant . Artists painting other artists’ portraits, artists as noble mirrors to sitting friends. Look, thinking expression, hair cut, moustache and beard care, stiff collar and eyes vivacity make these faces a distillate of each character and on the whole a sharp and exact repertory of the moral and political sense of some Italian generations.
This set of bright and quiet faces, portrayed in a weekly dimension of an evening spent discussing, a glass of water aside and a sigar waiting on an ashtray, means at my eyes much more than the packed paintings of historical theme, explaining events of national Risorgimento or the social rhetoric of the times.
With an astonishing expressive synthesis, catched in the sobriety of a black pencil as the only investigation tool, of a white chalk for the maximum light points, with just a sheet of pastel coloured paper and a careful and cautious glance, the elegant discipline of these Lombard portraits comes about. An elegance that from the intellectual aristocracy comes towards the characteristic features of the incoming middle-class world, as if with no solution of continuity. All this takes in its whole something like a film.
A sort of documentary is going to take shape, in a sequence of faces and thoughts, attitudes and nature of a series of painters and sculptors that marked taste and customs of a cultural and political capital town between the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century.

midip 22 Jul 2016 Collateral exhibitions 0 Comment Leggi tutto

Caricatures between XIX and XX

Caricatures: satiric and scornful vein among drawing masters.

by Massimo Pulini

A selection of sketched caricatures is shown together with the precious exhibition of portraits from Baratti Collection, coming from the same Group of Artists and of Milanese Patriotic Fans, giving a different picture of the same artistic movement in Lombardia between the XIX and the XX century.
In most cases, the very artists move something half in jest and, after portraying themselves in official posture, they used to take fun of each other.
Palanti,Morelli,Martinenghi o Bettinelli engage , with countenance and sincerity, in the goliardic rite of caricature.
Other members of the group and even true models suffer from it, being transformed in real characters, reduced to a geometric shape or under the deforming lens of the quickest and most sarcastic hands in Milan.
The outstanding Baratti collection of paper sheets lets us understand the great modernity of these artists, skilfull pencil swordman and pitiless charcoal boxers and it is just the disinhibited ground of irony that gives us back the fresh and fertile mood of that place among that group of artists.

midip 22 Jul 2016 Collateral exhibitions 0 Comment Leggi tutto

Tribute to Roberto Ciaccio – “Beyond the image: Time Memory Traces”

midip 29 Mar 2016 Collateral exhibitions Comments Off Leggi tutto