Free art. Italian futurism from the collection of Gianni Mattioli

In the halls of the permanent exhibition of the Gallery of Art of the Countries of Europe and America of the 19th – 20th centuries, 26 works of Italian masters from the collection of Gianni Mattioli will be shown.

The general sponsor of the exhibition is Sberbank.

The Milan collector Gianni Mattioli believed that art was capable of making a human being "more human and less beast." He formed the main body of his collection between 1943 and 1953. It is one of the most significant private collections of Italian art of the 20th century, which includes works by Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carr, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo, Ardengo Soffici, Ottone Rosai, Fortunato Depero, Mario Sironi, Amedeo Modigliani and Giorgio Morandi, all executed in 1910-1921. Through his collection, Mattioli sought to demonstrate the fundamental importance of futurism in the further development of Italian painting and its important role in the international art scene at the beginning of the 20th century.

“My goal now is to further select Italian works, as well as to complement them with a corpus of foreign works, in order to create a small private gallery - open, however, to anyone interested in art - where the main European movements, starting from impressionism and further, which would become evidence of the art born in the days when I happened to live, ”said Gianni Mattioli.

Futurists sought to bring Italy out of the periphery of the art world, so at the beginning of the 20th century they set out to conquer Paris, the capital of European art life and the art market.

To highlight the integral role of futurism in the avant-garde phenomena of the early 20th century, we present Italian masterpieces from the Gianni Mattioli collection in a European artistic context, integrating them into the structure of the permanent exhibition of the 19th-20th century European and American Art Gallery. The exhibition at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts will demonstrate the creative dialogue of the Italian avant-garde with the advanced trends in European art at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, reconstructing the situation on the French art scene, when a little more than a century ago, young Italian painters broke into Paris, freed from the cult of the past. and those who dared to challenge the stars. The dynamism of futurism gives the exposition a special impetus, thanks to which it is for the first time built in a different direction.

An outstanding collection of Gianni Mattioli has already been shown at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. After the completion of the exhibition in Moscow, the collection will return to Italy and enter the permanent exhibition of the Brera Modern Museum, a department of contemporary art at the Pinacoteca of Brera in Milan.

Italian art of the early 20th century is practically not represented in Russian collections, so the exhibition at the Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin gives viewers a unique and inimitable opportunity to learn from the best examples of one of the brightest pages of the European avant-garde.

The exhibition is being held under the patronage and support of the Italian Embassy in Moscow, together with the Italian Cultural Institutes in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as part of the cross-year events of cooperation between museums in Italy and Russia.

Curator: Elena Stepkina.