Until June 7: EMILIO MALERBA: FROM HIS BEGINNINGS TO THE NOVECENTO ITALIANO. Fondazione Ragghianti, Via San Michelotti 3, Lucca. Open 10 am – 7 pm, Tuesday to Sunday. Admission: €8. Additional concessions on the website.
One the 100th anniversary of his passing, Lucca’s Ragghianti Foundation presents an extensive show of works by Emilio Malerba (1878-1926), a seemingly straightforward yet complex artist who was an exponent of several Italian art movements, later pioneering one of them, the Novecento. Since the artist died at age 48, shortly before he was to participate in the Venice Biennale, many of his paintings are part of private collections, which are on loan to comprise a complete retrospective of Malerba’s oeuvre, or life work, never before displayed together.
Born in Milan, Malerba studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Much of his career was set during the Belle Époque (1880 and 1914) which was a matrix for the development of concurrent styles in art. He sympathized with the international outlook of the Scapigliatura cultural movement, the Italian equivalent of French Bohemianism. Malerba’s paintings illustrate his unique vision at the turn of the century, which encompasses the Belle Époque (1871 – 1914), and his artistic progression.
While immediately comes to mind when thinking of the Belle Époque are the color lithographs created by the French artist Toulouse-Lautrec for advertising or to reveal a slice of night life at clubs and cabarets. The Malerba show opens with a group of like-minded graphic works created for publicity, notably of liqueurs, in addition to magazine covers. These are characterized by graceful depictions of women, a theme that he would subsequently develop with more depth.
This next section unveils Malerba’s psychological portraits: modern yet timeless, with echoes of the past, mainly of young girls and women, often narrating a story.
These pieces reflect the canons of Purism, that focused on naturalism in contrast to ideal beauty. With the soul of each subject looking out at the viewer, Malerba carried this concept one step further. This is evident in “Grandmother’s Name Day,” 1910, (Italian celebrate family members on the day for which the saint for whom she/he is named is honored in the Catholic calendar). In this depiction a young girl is holding a bouquet of flowers, but her look blends melancholy with a touch of anxiety at the precise moment when she is thinking of her elderly relative. “Portrait of My Sister” (1913) is a feminist manifesto, with the subject’s gaze expressing a clear message of individualism and liberty. Both paintings are characterized by softness in contours and color palette in addition to exquisite drapery, while depicting the beginning (“Grandmother’s Name Day,”) and the arrival of womanhood (“Portrait of My Sister”).
During the same period, Malerba produced still lifes of flowers, with a blurred quality bringing to mind Impressionism. This juxtaposition is evident in the portrait of a friend’s wife, “Alessandro Macchi Menni with Son Piercarlo” (1917). Malerba’s friend, Carletto Menni, was army comrade. Past and present in the tender figures of mother and son adjacent to a bouquet of pale pink roses come together to form a moment of “here and now.”
Post-World War I, Malerba was a founding member of the Novecento movement which marked a return to the canons of classical art, a fusion evident in “Portrait of a Lady” (1924) while never abandoning the realistic portrayals characteristic of Purism, such as in “Portrait of Young Girl” (1922).
The exhibition also hosts works by other Novecento artists including Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi and Mario Sironi.
After a trip to Paris in 1925, Malerba was in the process of developing a more individualistic style. His last, unfinished work, that of a woman leaning forward to read a book, represents a new direction that he was unable to pursue further before his death the following year. (rosanna cirigliano)
