2023-11-30 16:04:26
Twentieth-century Neapolitan painting was characterized by the difficult relationship of first-generation artists with the nineteenth-century tradition, well-rooted at least until the outbreak of the Second World War. A bond that is represented in the exhibition ‘The figure and the landscape. Paths in Neapolitan painting of the twentieth century’, the exhibition curated by Isabella Valente scheduled at Villa Fiorentino, in Sorrento, Sorrento from December 2nd to January 28th.
However, the boundary between tradition and innovation was soon crossed. From the very beginning of the century, young artists placed themselves in the new directions that were taking shape in Italy, occupying an increasingly significant place in the critical debates of the time, also with strong connections with the literary and philosophical world as well as with the different Italian and European artistic trends. It is enough to browse the catalogs of the national and international exhibitions of the time (Union, Quadrennial and Biennial) to realize how much the painting and sculpture of the new Neapolitan school were aligned with the innovative demands of the other Italian schools.
Thirty-three artists of the Neapolitan school born between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century are represented through works of great beauty: Gaetano Bocchetti, Giovanni Brancaccio, Antonio Bresciani, Rubens Capaldo, Giuseppe and Guido Casciaro, Alberto Chiancone, Vincenzo Ciardo, Nicola Ciletti, Mario Cortiello, Luigi Crisconio, Edgardo Curcio, Nicola Fabricatore, Domenico Fiorentino, Francesco Galante, Manlio Giarrizzo, Franco Girosi, Biagio Mercadante, Emilio Notte, Edoardo Pansini, Paolo Pratella, Gaetano Ricchizzi, Roberto Scognamiglio, Eugenio Scorzelli, Carlo Striccoli, Amerigo Tamburrini, Carlo Verdecchia, Gennaro Villani, Eugenio Viti, Pasquale Vitiello, Mario Vittorio.
A woman, the wonderful painter Ada Pratella, and a living artist, Salvatore Vitagliano, complete the list of chosen painters. The figure and the landscape are the themes of the exhibition, central to the research and experimentation of these artists, who in their long activity chose to remain anchored to figurative art. These are therefore some paths identified within a complex, culturally composite artistic twentieth century, synonymous with multiple and multiform. For Neapolitan art it was a fertile and vital period, which had the opportunity to establish itself on the national scene, never retreating from growing movements or orientations, as studies of recent decades have demonstrated.
Just as the critic Paolo Ricci wrote about the First Exhibition of the ‘Free Neapolitan Artists’, set up at the Galleria Forti immediately after the war, underlining that that exhibition set itself “the task of bringing amateurs closer to the artists”, today’s exhibition and the catalog that accompanies it aims to turn the spotlight back on an important historical period that was wrongly set aside, but which from an artistic and cultural point of view was rich in excitement and different proposals, as documented by the many protagonists, painters and sculptors, the multiple orientations, the plurality of languages”.
Today’s exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the Municipality of Sorrento and the Department of Humanistic Studies of the University of Naples Federico II, hosted in the splendid Villa Fiorentino and managed by the Sorrento Foundation. To pay homage to the city of Sorrento, which hosts the exhibition, a section is dedicated to the coastal landscape with a group of works by the Sorrento painter Domenico Fiorentino, as well as some important American painters, such as Andrea (Drew) Bacigalupa and James Hennessey, who lived for long periods in the peninsula, where in the second half of the last century they established a truly new school of life painting.
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