20th century Italian art on display in Florence

Thanks to the tenth anniversary of its inauguration, Museo Novecento in Florence dedicates to the history of one of his most valuable collections, the Alberto Della Ragione collectionthe shows ‘Returns. From Modigliani to Morandi’. Designed by Sergio Risaliti with the curatorship of Eva Francioli and Chiara Toti, the exhibition reconstructs the complex events that led to the formation of one of the most important collections of the twentieth century by presenting, among others, canvases that would otherwise not be visible in Italy. Alongside the patron’s bequest, the exhibition project brings together around twenty masterpieces that passed through his collection before the deed of donation to the city of Florence, a few years after the flood of 1966, of 241 works which then went on to constitute the nucleus of the Museum.

The exhibition probes the trajectories of taste that have inspired the choices of Alberto Della Ragione over the years, protagonist of an extraordinary season in the history of art and collecting in our country. Among the works of the great masters from prestigious public and private collections we highlight ‘Metaphysical still life’ by Morandi And ‘The Enchanted Room’ by Carrà beyond ‘Crucifixion’ by Renato Guttusonow preserved at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.

The undisputed protagonist of the event is certainly the only one ‘Self-portrait’ existing in the world of Amedeo Modigliani. A work of great interest since the 1930s, the painting, currently preserved in the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Usp of São Paulo, returns to Florence after approximately eighty years. The canvas, purchased by Della Ragione in 1938, was resold by him in 1944 to recover the resources necessary to support younger artists. Initially oriented towards the already well-known names of Italian art, the Maecenas’s taste, in fact, gradually turned towards little-known artists, often rejected by gallery owners because they were considered too experimental.

Alongside the works of the masters of ‘Valori plastici’, Della Ragione included the creations of the ‘Corrente’ group and the ‘Roman school’, generating a radical change of direction for the collection. Thus an exceptional collection took shape, widely representative of the evolution of Italian art between the two wars. Testifying to the change in taste that occurred in those years was the Exhibition of Contemporary Art Collections in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1941 where the Collection obtained first prize precisely for the presence of the new generations of Italian art.