Milan, June 2009: at Palazzo Reale an extraordinary and rich exhibition is being held to celebrate the “Scapigliatura” until the 22nd November.
Milan, around 1860: painters Tranquillo Cremona, Vespasiano Bignami, Eleuterio Pagliano and Sebastiano De Albertis adhered to the «Società de la confusion» giving life to a new movement called “Scapigliatura”. While in the Nineteenth century Paris was becoming the propulsive centre of the international artistic scene, in the more gathered Milanese reality a post-romantic current was taking shape, generated by a widespread intolerance towards the inflexible academic system. The term “Scapiglitura”, a local revisitation of the term “bohémien”, originates from the title of the novel by Cletto Arrighi from 1862, La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio, which narrated with passionate tones the story of a group of tumultuous and rebellious anti-Austrians, willing to sacrifice themselves for an ideal, with very similar features to the future artists of the Scapigliatura.
The movement brought together people with a free and democratic temperament, who shared the need to break off with the conventional cultural system and knock down the veil of middle-class conformism of those years. Artists of various nature, painters, sculptors, theatre actors, musicians and writers, without the need for a manifesto or a pre-established order, with their audacious choices, their anti-conventional experiences full of emotions, fought against conformism and contested academicism, a prophetic modus operandi for the birth and the maturation of the future avant-gardes. The Scapigliatura, born as an artistic movement, also became a form of socio-political militancy and, in its complexity, it declined its various aspects through different disciplines. Common denominator of every expressive form were passion, feelings, introspection, undertones and uncertainties of the human soul, far from the Impressionist frivolity, too often – and wrongfully – associated to the ways of the Scapigliati.
The exhibition of 250 works including paintings, sculptures, graphics and etchings, texts, photos and much more, is articulated in four sections, chronologically ordered in decades, which represent the climate of the Lombard artistic experience in conflict with tradition.
Rarefied and delicate atmospheres characterise the first section dedicated to the 1860s, when the first masters of the movement, like Giuseppe Rovani, Il Piccio (Giovanni Carnovali), Federico Faruffini, Filippo Carcano and Mosé Bianchi, with an innovative language, were the pioneers who opened up the way to anti-academic art.
The 1870s appear more vigorous, with renowned protagonists like Daniele Ranzoni, Tranquillo Cremona and Giuseppe Grandi who proposed with greater strength the issues and tones from the previous decade. Here pictorial rebellion is translated into flaky and loose brushstrokes, free from the slavery of lines and outlines which are dissolved in an animated mosaic of lights and coloured patches. Shapes are perceived, sketched and not described by a disordered – but targeted – maze of touches of colour which, especially in Cremona’s love “duets”, are placed next to each other harmoniously like brief notes of a symphony.
In the 1880s, sculpture gained ground. On view there are works by Giuseppe Grandi, whose plasters of the monument to the Five Days are exhibited for the first time, after being restored for the occasion, works by Ernesto Bazzaro, by the young Paolo Troubetzkoy, one of Ranzoni’s pupils, by the first Leonardo Bistolfi and the total formal dissolution of Medardo Rosso. The last section, dedicated to the 1890s, narrates the definition of a “maniera scapigliata”, a codification of the new Lombard idiom according to more or less academic principles, thanks to the adhesion of the new generation to the association “Famiglia Artistica” founded by Bignami in 1872. If Eugenio Pellini and Camillo Rapetti followed respectfully the traces of the tradition of the Scapigliatura, others, like Gaetano Previati, gave life to more innovative and original formulas, almost outlining Divisionism.
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