Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art

A major retrospective was inaugurated on Saturday, December 17th, in Venice, at the Museum of Ca’ Pesaro, aimed at discovering, tracing back and documenting, through more than two hundred works – including paintings, drawings, watercolours and etchings – the creative career of Gennaro Favai (Venice 1879-1958), a Venetian artist who succeeded in combining an extraordinary mastery of painting technique with the expressive needs of Symbolist poetry.

Gennaro Favai was friends, among others, with Mario De Maria and Mariano Fortuny, and was able to move with equal ease between Venice, the lively cosmopolitan milieu of Capri and the great cultural capitals of the time.

Set up on the 2nd floor of Ca’ Pesaro, the exhibition is divided, according to an “episodic” rather than chronological cut, into three main groups, namely: the “Venetian Views”, from his first phase, full of decadent and nocturnal accents; the core, represented by his “Mediterranean Trip” between Taormina, Syracuse, Capri and Algiers (in the ‘10s, ‘20s and ‘30s of the 20th century), with the creation of a new morphology of landscape characterized by intense colours and strong contrasts of light and shade of the Mediterranean light and, finally, “bird’s eye views” of a transparent and visionary Venice of his last period.

The path is completed by a section dedicated to his relationship with some of his illustrious contemporaries – i.e. Modigliani, Medardo Rosso and Raoul Dufy – of whom there are portraits on display along with caricatures dedicated to the Venetian, as well as a selection of self-portraits and still lifes made throughout the course of his artistic career, set in a reconstruction of the environment in his studio.PB

From November 24th 2011 to February 26th 2012

The exhibition “A Tribute to Lorenzo Lotto. Paintings from the Hermitage at the Academy Galleries” was opened in November 24th 2011 in Venice. It was made possible by the exceptional loan granted by the Museum of St. Petersburg to the Venetian galleries of two paintings rarely – if ever – seen before in Italy, namely: “the Portrait of Spouses” and the “Madonna delle Grazie“.

It is an exceptional event, a small solo exhibition which will remain open only until February 26th 2012, whose organizers have been able to make the most of the work of two of the most important galleries in the world. It is an exhibition of research, with the limits of spectacularity that this often involves, but also with the results and innovations that emerge from the activity of research, restoration and presentation of new works.

An exhibition of research, as we said, that focuses around specific moments in Lotto’s career or on distinctive themes.

The two Russian paintings belong to very different but somehow mysteriously symmetrical periods of the painter’s career: the last years of his happy period in Bergamo, the most serene in Lotto’s life, on the eve of his return to Venice, and the last years of his stay in Venice just before leaving the lagoon city for Treviso, where he would find himself “alone, without faithful government and very troubled in his mind”.

Therefore, the exhibition offers a rich and composite path that puts the two works in dialogue with other paintings by Lotto from European museums and from the collection of the Academia Galleries. The path of the present exhibition, curated by Matteo Ceriana, also includes contemporary paintings and sculptures derived from works of the Venetian master and documents that help tracing out his historical and artistic context.PB

Info and booking: phone (39) 041 5200345, www.gallerieaccademia.org
Ticket: full price € 11.00, reduced € 9.00

From January 2012

The Bevilacqua – La Masa Foundation is planning for 2012 an intense calendar of very interesting exhibition events.

It will start on February 2nd 2012, with two exhibitions: the one to be opened at the Gallery in St. Mark’s Square, a collective end-of-stay exhibition of the young artists currently assignees of studies; and the other, to be presented in Palazzetto Tito, a collection of interesting creative re-workings of legendary Moleskine notebooks made by artists, architects, designers, illustrators and writers active in the international scene.

In March 2012, the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation will host the final initiative of the project, “A special day”: an exhibition event which will see on display in the halls of Palazzetto Tito works by Antonio Bigini, Tomaso De Luca, Sabina Grasso and Andrea Romano, which will be accompanied by a series of meetings and debates.

From April 3rd, it will be the turn of the exhibition organized in collaboration with the Modena Photography Foundation. On display at the Gallery in St. Marks’ Square, 49 photos, 9 videos and an installation by international artists. The works belong to the collection of contemporary photography of the Cassa di Risparmio di Modena Foundation.PB

From November 16th 2011

On November 16th 2011, at the Giorgio Cini Foundation on the Island of San Giorgio (Venice), at 11.30 am, the new ELONORA DUSE ROOM was officially presented to the public, a new permanent space dedicated to the memory of the great Italian actress.

The project stems from the desire to turning the Eleonora Duse Archives of the Giorgio Cini Foundation into a “place” open to the public to discover and visit.

The valuable collection of materials housed at the Study Centre for documentary research on the European theatre and music drama represents an inexhaustible source to understand the life and art of one of the most important Italian theatrical actresses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the undisputed symbol of modern theatre. Precisely in Venice she had been looking for – and virtually found – a welcoming atmosphere and a home where to live for quite some time.

The new space dedicated to Duse will give visitors the chance to admire part of the documents preserved in the rich Archives: autographs, including letters, scripts, accounting documents and company records, as well as original photographs, personal items, clothes and a part of her furniture. The layout of the setting up allows displaying and developing different themes that characterized her art or distinct periods of her life, themes which will form the guidelines for temporary exhibitions.

From December 17th 2011 to April 1st 2012

At Palazzo Franchetti, the seat of the Venetian Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts of Venice, an exhibition entitled “Photography in Japan (1860-1910) is being held since Saturday, December 17th 2011. Masterpieces”. It is the first retrospective ever organized in Italy dedicated to the great Japanese and European performers who worked in the field of photography between 1860 and the very early years of the 20th century.

“Photography in Japan (1860-1910). Masterpieces”, the first retrospective in Italy dedicated to the great Japanese and European performers who worked in the field of photography between 1860 and the very early years of the 20th century.

The exhibition presents 150 original prints, the masterpieces of one of the most important chapters in the history of photography – born in Europe but immediately experienced in Japan – just at the time when, leaving an isolation that had lasted for three hundred years, the Land of the Rising Sun opened up to America and Europe, influencing, with the images and expressions of its creativity, the taste of the entire Western world.

The exhibition circuit, organized by sections, is also enriched by the works of some great photographers of the origins, including – first of all – the English Felice Beato (1833 – 1907) who, with a small group of Japanese artists, gave birth to a style called the Yokohama School, as well as to a special technique. These personalities were able to combine photography, the most avant-gardist art form of the time, with the tradition of Japanese graphics, making photographic prints on albumin paper lightly hand-coloured individually by refined craftsmen.

The exhibition ends with works by the great interpreters of Japanese and foreign photography, such as Kusakabe Kimbei, considered the master in creating sophisticated hand-coloured albumin photographs.PB

Open every day except on Tuesday

Opening hours: 10:00 am – 06:00 pm

Tickets: Full price € 9.00, reduced € 7.50

Until 30th April 2012

On 9th December 2011, on the Island of Murano, in the Museum of Glass, the exhibition “1861-2011: UN’ISOLA, UN’ARTE, UN MUSEO” [one island, one art, one museum] was inaugurated. It is a great retrospective exhibition on the art of glass-making, which allows visitors to learn about the history and life of this Venetian island, famous all over the world for its glass works of art. In 1861 an archive that held information on the long history of glass making in Murano was created. The archive had a museum section as well, which soon became the most important section because many glass items (ancient and modern) produced in the island were donated by the owners of the kilns. To mark the 150th anniversary of the creation of the archive, a great exhibition containing almost two hundred items was opened. The items were made in the last 150 years and are the most significant elements in the museum’s collection. They are an example of the unique skills of their creators.

The exhibition includes items shown during the Biennale exhibitions and creations by master glass makers and glass factories that had not been previously exhibited. There will also be new donations, which have increased the museum’s collection of XX century items.

Until 1st January 2012

Until 1st January 2012 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is the venue of the third edition of Massimo Barbero’s curated project “Themes&Variations”. It will be held in the halls of the Gallery dedicated to temporary exhibitions. The masterpieces of the museum are thematically and scientifically compared to pieces of art created by more modern artists from other collections. The aim is to guide visitors and help them fully understand the work of the new art movements at the beginning of the XX century, by putting them in their historical context and comparing them to other paintings, sculptures and more recent creations. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to see how themes and symbols evolved into new kinds of artistic expression.

The subject of this edition’s exhibition is “Script and space”. The “script” can be seen in the transition from the cubist and futurist collages of Pablo Picasso and Carlo Carrà to the crypto-script of Dadamaino and Riccardo De marchi, including the all-round work of Rudolf Stingel, which is connected to the expressionist script of Jackson Pollock. “Space” opens with Rufino Tamayo’s cosmos and reaches Mario Nigro, François Morellet and Arthur Duff. The exhibition ends with homage to Gastone Novelli (1925-68), one of the main Italian artists in the 1950s and 1960s.

The end of the exhibition is the “Gastone Novelli and Venice” exhibition, dedicated to one of the main Italian artists in the 1950s and 1960s and organised with the help of the Rome Gastone Novelli Archive. The relationship of the artist is reconstructed through his poetic script, his great, balanced canvases with signs, marks, colours and words. There are some notebooks from the 1960s with pictures of Venice, as well as pictures painted between 1964 and 1968. some are unpublished and dedicated to the city or painted in his Venetian art studio.TD

From 24th November 2011 to 26th February 2012

The “Homage to Lorenzo Lotto” Exhibition in Venice will be open until 26th February 2012. The State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia) has lent the Accademia museum gallery in Venice two paintings that have rarely – if ever – been seen in Italy, “Husband and Wife” and “Madonna delle Grazie”.

It is an exceptional event – a small monographic exhibition that will be open until 26th February 2012. The efforts of two of the most important art galleries in the world came to fruition. It is a research exhibition, which has the spectacular limits that this often implies, as well as the results and new elements that emerge from research, restoration and the presentation of new pieces of art.

“Homage to Lorenzo Lotto” is part of the Terre di Lotto project, which is a territorial valorisation project created during the great retrospective exhibition held in the Scuderie del Quirinale and dedicated to Lorenzo Lotto (Rome, 2nd March – 12th June 2011, organised by Giovanni C.F. Villa). The project aims at keeping exhibitions alive after they end by continuing in the areas where the artist’s work is kept normally.

This research exhibition, as mentioned above, focuses on precise periods in Lotto’s painting career or on characteristic themes.

The two pictures from Russia were painted at very different times, yet somehow they are strangely symmetrical. One was painted when the artist was in the happiest period of his life, living in Bergamo and about to return to Venice. The other was painted just before he left the lagoon city to settle in Treviso, where he was ‘alone, without a state to be loyal to and very upset in the mind.’

The exhibition therefore is very interesting and places the two Russian paintings in touch with other paintings by the same artists, loaned by other European museums and by the collection in the Venice Accademia. The exhibition’s layout – created by Matteo Ceriana – includes paintings and sculptures of the same period, derived from other pieces of art by the artist, as well as documents that help re-create the historical and artistic context.

From 27th November 2011

With the Finissage of the 54th International Art Exhibition, the VIDEO MEDIUM INTERMEDIUM, an exhibition of artist videos from the ASAC (Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts) collections, opened in Palazzo Giustinian, which confirms yet again that this is the venue of the permanent activities of the Venice Biennale.

After the success of the exhibition of historical posters (Ca’ Giustinian, 25th February – 20th May 2011), the Biennale will offer 32 artists’ videos selected by Bice Curiger, filmed by 53 artists between 1969 and 1975, as well as photographs and other documents from the archives of ASAC. For the first time the general public will be able to appreciate this amazing (recently restored) legacy that documents the developing art of film-making in Europe at the beginning of the 1970s. This transnational phenomenon is linked to the contemporary avant-garde art movements such as Body Art, Land Art, Performance Art, Lettrism and Minimalism, which had important effects in Italy as well (to date, they have not been valorised as they should).

The exhibition’s title, VIDEO MEDIUM INTERMEDIUM, reveals how video brought together artists from different movements (Land Art, Antitelevisione, Arte concettuale, Performance Art) and laid the foundation for the creation of a new international community.

In the Portego on the ground floor of Ca’ Giustinian there will be screens to watch the videos, which were selected among the themes identified by Bice Curiger. There will be photographs and other documents from the archives as well. In the two side halls, a video library will be set up. There will be a daily programme allowing visitors to watch the selected videos more comfortably. The Sala delle Colonne [Column Hall] will be the venue of a number of meetings dedicated to the main characters of the time and to the current issues related to spreading and preserving these video materials.TD

Until January 6th 2012

On the occasion of the exhibition “ELEGANCE IN EXILE. Between fashion and costume, Diaghilev’s time”, more than two hundred costumes of the “Ballets Russes” will be exhibited in the evocative rooms on the main floor of the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo, the Centre for the Study of the History of Textiles and Costume, in Venice.

The Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo has been dealing for years with fashion and “piecework”, perfect to represent men “in their time”. The history of fashion adds meaning to the human, revealing people’s desire and need for beauty, ethnical origin and international relations or influences.

This also applies to the “Russian style” of the early 20th century, which covers the years that saw the success of the famous company of the “Ballets Russes” (1909-1929), together with the artistic passion of their great impresario, Sergei Diaghilev, who had great influence on the fashion world of his time, and was the creator of a style “of eastern inspiration” in performing arts which was appreciated throughout Europe.

The exhibition circuit starts from the costumes of the “Ballets Russes”, made ​​by famous artists Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova, André Derain, and then moves on to the clothes made ​​by Russian emigrated nobles fled to several European countries following the October Revolution, up to many other clothes, accessories, pictures and documentary material from the collections of Alexandre Vassiliev, a fashion historian and world-renowned collector, besides a selection of theatrical costumes and works of artmade ​​by famous artists, including Léon Bakst himself, Alexander Benois and Trubenskoj, from the collection of the famous dancer and choreographer Toni Candeloro who, during a twenty-five year career on the international dance scene, had the opportunity to meet some of the artists belonging to the latest generation of the Ballets Russes, from whom he received as a gift the artworks and choreographic heritage. TD

Admittance with the opening hours and ticket of the museum: until October 31st: from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm (ticket office from 10:00 am to 4:30 pm); from November 1st: from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm (ticket office from 10:00 am to 3:30 pm) – closed on Mondays, December 25th and January 1st

Tania Danieli