Expectations grow in Milan two days before the opening of the highly anticipated exhibition at Palazzo Reale “Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso Paris.” The show gathers more than 250 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs, and covers all the creative periods of the Spanish master. It was curated by Anne Baldassari, director of the French museum and one of foremost experts of Picasso. Some of the works have never been exhibited outside of the museums before this touring exhibition, which was organized while the museum undergoes a multiyear renovation. The loan fees for the exhibition will help financing the renovations, even if this loan policy has already sparked off polemics and critics on the part of French curators who claimed the commodification of this national collection.

The Musée Picasso was born in 1979, six years after the death of the artist, thanks to a French law called “dation.” This law, in force since 1968, allowed the heirs of the artists to pay inheritance tax in kind, handing over to the state 203 paintings, 158 sculptures, 29 relief paintings, 88 ceramics, 1,500 drawings and 1,600 etchings, as well as manuscripts and works of pasted paper. These works belonged to the artist’s collection, to the ones he had not parted from. In 1990 the state inherited another collection of Picasso’s works: the one of his last wife. Jacqueline Roque, who had committed suicide in 1986. Other works in the museum come from Picasso’s collection of his contemporaries and from his archive of documents.

Picasso’s exhibition in Milan is now the third major Picasso exhibition in the city. The first one goes back to 1953 and took place in the same museum. The show went down in history because the organizers succeeded in bringing to Milan Guernica, which at that time was at MoMA in New York. Picasso had initially been reluctant, being afraid of possible attacks on the part of the Franco government. Eventually the artist accepted, on one condition: the Hall of Caryatids, where the work was to be installed, should not be renovated. It had to carry the signs of destruction caused by war, and to serve as a warning against the madness of war. The second exhibition in Milan took place in 2001.

Highlights from the exhibition include The Celestina (1904), a work from Picasso’s blue period, in which he expressed suffering and death through the livid blue color; Man with a mandolin (1911), an important example of cubist decomposition; Portrait of Olga (1918), a picture of his first wife Olga Khokhlova, a dancer he had met frequenting the Russian ballet, who became the mother of his first son, Paul. Paul is the subject of another important work on show: Paul as Harlequin (1924). The child is represented with a melancholic gaze and dressed as Harlequin, a figure that fascinated Picasso and comes up very often in his production.

All exhibited works show the ability of Picasso of continuously reinventing his style. As the curator said: “The collection of the Musée Picasso represents Picasso’s work in progress, his surprises, his leaps forward and his regrets, his meanderings and his retreats.” A work such as Two women running on the beach (1922) testify his return to order and figuration after the cubist decomposition, it shows the influence of classicism. But later, Picasso called everything into question again. We can see it in Portrait of Dora Maar (1937), the photographer, Surrealists muse and Picasso’s lover for many years who was always represented by the artist as a woman in tears. From the same year, 1937, is The Supplicant. It was a crucial year for Picasso, the year of Guernica. The Supplicant falls into the same contest. The crying woman recalls the figures of the masterpiece in which Picasso denounces the atrocities of war, but it reflects also his love life and the conditions in which he reduced his partners.

The exhibition includes many photographs by famous photographers, as well, who contributed to increase the cult of personality around Picasso. There are works by Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Brassaï and Dora Maar, who shot the production phases of Guernica, and then later works by Irving Penn and David Douglas Duncan. A special exhibition about Duncan’s photographs of Picasso will be mounted at Instituto Cervantes from Oct. 10 to Jan. 10.

Expectations related to the Milan’s show are high also in reference to the number of visitors. Before coming to Milan the show was at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where it drew more than 300,000 visitors. For the exhibition in Milan there are already 100,000 bookings.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE

---

The art season in Milan reopens today after the summer break with a series of events and exhibition openings organized by START, an association founded in 2006 that connects 29 of the most interesting art galleries in town, such as Massimo de Carlo, Kaufmann Repetto, Francesca Minini, Zero, and Lia Rumma among others.

Last year the event attracted 25,000 visitors. This figure is expected to be higher this year, thanks to an extremely rich and varied program, which covers 10 days (double from last year) and includes exhibitions, conferences, and screenings. Filmhouse Spazio Oberdan, for example, is holding a special retrospective dedicated to the work of renowned Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni with a one-night screening of his masterpieces: “The Outcry,” “Blow Up” and “Eclipse.”

START President Pasquale Leccese, owner of the gallery Le Case d’Arte, said: “This year it was necessary to give a strong message. It is a good omen for the beginning of the new season, and it shows our will of being active interlocutors in animating contemporary art in the city. So we decided to open the season with an out-and-out festival of contemporary art. Beyond the 26 galleries that take part in the initiative, we have programmed 10 days of contemporary art that include many institutions in town.”

In his gallery, Pasquale Leccese will present an exhibition by German artist Rosemarie Trockel, titled “Prisoners of Yourself.” The centerpiece of the show is a screen printing on wall of 14 x 1.4 meters that reproduces a knitting pattern, a leitmotif in her work.

Another highlight of the START week is Rob Pruitt’s exhibition “Faces: People and Panda” at Massimo De Carlo’s gallery. It is the first solo presentation of the American artist at the gallery. It will include glittering pandas, smiles and irreverent sculptures that, behind their kitsch aspect, hide criticism towards the contradictions of the society and the art world.

Kaufmann Repetto will show a double solo show by Fausto Falchi, a young Italian artist, and Dan Perjovschi, a Rumanian artist who is known for his cartoon-like drawings. Lia Rumma shows a project by Anselm Kiefer in which the German artist looks back in history until the time of the Fertile Crescent. Zero Gallery will present, for the first time in Italy, works by Michael E. Smith, a young artist from Detroit who uses materials from the car industry that has so deeply signed the city’s destiny. Zonca & Zonca will highlight one of the protagonists of Italian Postwar art: Mario Schifano, in particular his paintings from the 1980s.

There is place for photography, as well. Camera 16 will dedicate an exhibition to fashion photography, while Ca’ di Fra’ will show portraits of singer and songwriter Fabrizio de Andrè by Mimmo Dabbrescia.

The program of the institutions is not less interesting. The Swiss Institute will host a party and a lecture by Roman Signer, while Museo Pecci Milano will screen video art from China from 1988 to 2011.

The young association “That’s Contemporary” will hold two conferences that are part of a very curious program: a census of all artists living in Milan. The project is called S.A.V.E. Milan and was conceived by Ambra Pittoni and Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano. The curators will open for a month a fictive office of investigations, where they will collect the testimonies of the Milan-based artists; they will listen to their personal stories, their needs and their wishes. More than a real census, S.A.V.E. Milan is clearly a performance. The aim is to explore the art scene of Milan, to reinterpret the city through its artists and give a new (and unusual) image of it.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE

---

“Hidden amidst luxuriant Sicilian vegetation, hibiscus, bougainvillea, wild fennel, prickly pears, all immersed in grassland the color of lime; along the path that a variety of pilgrims take to climb to the edge of Stromboli’s volcano, a row of little white rooms with light gray floors will be, once again, the home of Volcano Extravaganza 2012. Neither nomadism nor wandering, but brightness and a 360-degree horizon, Alighiero Boetti suggested the name stra-vaganza as an allusion to those who want to invest in the multiplicity and unexpected nature of encounters. We invite you to make your own precious contribution, in terms of free associations and spontaneous intuitions.”

This message was sent by curators Milovan Farronato and Nick Mauss to 10 artists such as Andro Wekua and Thea Djordjadze to invite them to take part in Volcano Extravaganza, a series of art events taking place in July and August on the island of Stromboli, Sicily. The project is organized for the second time by Fiorucci Art Trust, a private foundation created in 2011 by Nicoletta Fiorucci, a collector of contemporary art.

In this way, Volcano Extravaganza brings contemporary art to the holiday resorts in August, a month that in Italy is synonymous with vacation. More specifically, the choice of the Aeolian Islands recalls a long tradition of creativity on these small islands off the Sicilian coast, famous for their primitive beauty and their active volcanos. Discovered by hippies and bohemians and beloved by artists and intellectuals, the Aeolian Islands became popular in 1950, when filmmakers Roberto Rossellini and William Dieterle chose them for shooting respectively Stromboli, Terra di Dio and Volcano, featuring stars Ingrid Bergman and Anna Magnani. The affair between Bergman and Rossellini, who was Magnani’s partner, caused a scandal and draw the public attention on the islands.

Besides the artists, Volcano Extravaganza has invited to Stromboli a number of guests such as Mark Nash, head of department of Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London, and Stuart Comer, curator of film at Tate Modern in London, to perform a soliloquy in front of the volcano, a moment of confrontation between man and nature in which the majesty of nature is enhanced: “A platform on a black rock cliff resembling the prow of a ship, with the drowning sun and spray of sea-foam at your back. We invite you to take a position and express your own voice in confrontation with the constantly erupting volcano you are facing from below.”

Parallel to Volcano Extravaganza, another art event takes place in Lipari, the biggest of the Aeolian Islands. It’s “Io Te e il Mare,” which means “Me You and the Sea,” a residency program for artists organized by That’s Contemporary, a Milan-based association which was started less than a year ago.

“The idea of the residency came out of a conversation with Milovan Farronato who was organizing the second edition of Volcano Extravanganza in Stromboli,” Francesca Baglietto, co-curators of the project together with Amy McDonnell, explains to Auction Central News. “We liked the idea of creating on the Archipelago a flow of people, ideas and unusual projects. The residency takes place in a farmhouse on Lipari’s hills, where, starting August 12, there will be a continuous coming and going of people. The residency program will finish in Stromboli on August 23.”

“That’s contemporary” has invited to Lipari 10 artists like the group “Alterazioni Video” to intervene in the island’s space with the awareness that is is not possible to represent the place in an objective way, thus rather concentrating on the perceived place. “We wanted to create an atypical residency which could start a dialog with the rhythm of the island, with its characteristics and its temperature,” says Francesca Baglietto. “We were aware of the time-limit that we have and of the separation from the region, so we decided to transform these limitations in our strong point, imposing our presence on the island and creating a sort of micro-community on the highest point of Lipari. Io Te e il Mare is an island on the island, a kind of temporary mental place.”

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE

---

According to legend, Angelo Campiglio and the Necchi sisters discovered the piece of land in the center of Milan where they later would build their Villa Necchi Campiglio by accident. Originally from the Lombard small town of Pavia and members of the new industrial aristocracy, Angelo Campiglio, Nedda, and Gigina Necchi, Angelo’s wife, loved the elegant and fancy life of Milan in the 1930s. One evening they were coming back from the theater, when their driver lost his way and, wandering through the winding and densely grown area, they came to find the plot of land for sale.

They bought it and had their mansion built by a leading architect of the period, Piero Portaluppi, between 1932 and 1935. Portaluppi built a modern and confortable house with spacious rooms, high ceilings, precious materials and geometrical patterns. It was the first house in town with a private swimming pool and a tennis court.

Today the entire residential complex is part of Milan’s Network of Historic House Museums, a group of four fascinating houses, all situated in the center of Milan, that were bequeathed by their owners to the city and are now open to the public. Visiting them allows one to not only to learn the personal stories and tastes of the owners, but also to observe the evolution and transformation of Milanese art and society.

Villa Necchi Campiglio, with its modernity and elegance, reflects the energy and industriousness of Milan in the decades between the end of the 1920s and the war. Portaluppi was an innovative architect, aware of history, but capable to mix it with the modernity of the present. Besides the already mentioned innovations like the swimming pool and the tennis court, the modernity of the residence can be found in the geometric purity, the linearity of the surfaces, the large glass panels of the veranda, and in the round and star-shape windows of the bathrooms—which are a must-see in the tour of the house.

After the war the house was renovated by architect Tommaso Buzzi, who impressed a much more decorative and elaborate style to some rooms, inspired by the 18th century taste.

Today the home also hosts two art collections: one is the art collection of Milanese art dealer and collector Claudia Gian Ferrari, daughter of the influent art dealer Ettore Gian Ferrari, who donated her artworks to Villa Necchi Campiglio before her death in 2010. The collection includes 44 paintings by Italian masters of the first half of the 20th century like Arturo Martini, Giorgio de Chirico and Mario Sironi, which perfectly integrate in the 1930s atmosphere of the house. The other collection consists of the furnishings and works of art from the 18th century of Alighiero de’ Micheli and his wife, Emilietta, preserved in the room where Princess Maria Gabriella di Savoia, a dear family friend, used to sleep when she visited the Necchi Campiglios.

Piero Portaluppi was the architect of another house museum included in the Milanese network: Casa Museo Boschi di Stefano. Antonio Boschi was a brilliant engineer working at Pirelli, while his wife Marieda Di Stefano was a ceramist. Together they were passionate art collectors. “This was a joint venture in every sense,” Antonio Boschi said after his wife died, “in the material sense, as it implied decision-making, commitment, and financial sacrifices entailing hardships in other fields; and in the artistic sense, through a sharing of taste, objectives and choices.” The Boschi di Stefanos collected over 2,000 works dating from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1970s. When the couple were alive, every corner of the house was covered with artworks. Today only 300 of them are displayed in chronological order in the 10 rooms of the home. Among the artists included in the collection are Mario Sironi, Carlo Carrà, Filippo De Pisis and Giorgio Morandi. One room is entirely dedicated to Lucio Fontana, of whom the collectors were keen supporters. The “Fontana room” contains 23 works by the Italian master, who is today sought-after at the international level.

The furnishing of the house was later added by the Museum Foundation to match the style of the works on show, and includes a rich collection of Murrina chandeliers.

The other two house museums in the network go back to an older age: Museo Bagatti Valsecchi was the residence of Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi, two aristocratic brothers who lived at the end of the 19th century. Renovation of the Bagatti Valsecchis home was inspired by the Renaissance style. The brothers were personally involved in the planning of the house and acquired artworks and objects coherently with the architectural style. Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli was of a generation older than the two brothers. His house was opened to the public two years after his death in 1879. Poldi Pezzoli was one of the most enlightened art collectors of his days. His house was a successful example of historicism in Europe. Each room was inspired by a style from the past and hosted an exceptional selection of antique and decorative art. Part of the decoration was destroyed during the war, but the surviving rooms can still be visited, together with the new armory, designed by Arnaldo Pomodoro.

About Silvia Anna Barrilà:

Silvia Anna Barrilà is an Italian fine arts journalist and regular contributor to the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 ORE (ArtEconomy24). She also writes about art, design, lifestyle and society for a number of Italian and international magazines, including DAMn Magazine and ICON (Mondadori). She is based in Milan and Berlin.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE

---

Until a couple of days ago, almost nobody knew about the existence of the so-called Fondo Peterzano, an archive of 1,378 drawings by Lombard painter Simone Peterzano and his pupils which is preserved in the cabinet of drawings of Milan’s Sforza Castle and is property of the City of Milan. But almost everybody knows Caravaggio, rebellious genius of Italian painting, who lived between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century and is well known for his ability of shaping the figures on the canvas through an extremely dramatic use of darks and lights. And so it came to pass that the Fondo Pederzano came in the spotlight, when two scholars, namely Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli, claimed to have found 100 drawings by Caravaggio among the works of the fund.

The alleged discovery has immediately raised a heated dispute about the authenticity of the attribution. Polemics were aroused also by the way in which the news was revealed: Italian Press Agency ANSA had the sole rights to the distribution of the news, while two e-books about the research were ready to be sold on Amazon. A few hours after the publication of the news, the e-books were sold out. (Amazon has since withdrawn the controversial book.)

Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli have apparently spent two years looking for traces of Caravaggio’s presence in Milan, the city where he was born and where he trained as a painter between 1584 and 1588, under Simone Peterzano. The two art historians detected his hand in this group of drawings and claim that these early studies are recognizable in later paintings created in Rome, like “Supper at Emmaus,” painted in 1606.

The scholars have provided an estimate of the value of their discovery, as well: 700 million euros ($860 million). Milan city council has announced it is launching an investigation into the authors’ research methods. A commission composed by museum directors and university professors such as Maria Teresa Fiorio, Giulio Bora, Claudio Salsi, and Francesca Rossi met together with Stefano Boeri, Councillor for Cultural Affairs of the City, to discuss the discovery. The commission has not take a definitive position and has announced a study day and an exhibition after this summer.

However, reactions of Caravaggio’s experts and of the art community have been skeptical. Most of the opinions expressed in newspapers dismiss the attribution.

The drawings had been already known within the art-historian community. Scholars like Mina Gregori, who is considered an international authority on Caravaggio, had already studied the find and did not recognize in it the hand of the master. Rossella Vodret, Head of the Museum Pole of Rome, and Francesca Cappelletti, also an expert on Caravaggio, are skeptical, as well. The current curator of the cabinet of drawings of the Sforza Castle, Francesca Rossi, affirmed that Bernardelli Curuz and Conconi Fedrigolli never went there in person to analyze the drawings; their studies were based on black and white photographs. The two scholars replied that they have been there “after hours,” thanks to a high-level city official they did not want to name.

Gianni Papi, another well-known expert on Caravaggio, emphasized that is not possible to attribute a drawing to Caravaggio because there are no drawings that are officially and definitively recognized as his work. There is no basis for comparison. Some have doubts as to whether Caravaggio drew at all. Furthermore, it is difficult to believe that Caravaggio would have painted in his later years the same models he drew in his early years. Or it is also possible that he remembered some figures he had seen in drawings by his master?

The only certainty is that Caravaggio’s name is able to move the masses and this is probably why there are regularly new attempts to attribute rediscovered works to him.

Just one year ago, art historian Silvia Danesi Squarzina claimed to have found in a Spanish private collection a portrait of Saint Augustine commissioned to Caravaggio by aristocratic banker and art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani. In 2010, exactly during the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio’s death, another supposed painting by the Italian master appeared in Rome, the “Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence.”

Apart from the truthfulness of the attributions, such revelations fuel a sensationalistic approach to art history—which is already mistreated enough—and do an injustice to the scientific methods used by the art historians.

#   #   #

About Silvia Anna Barrilà:

Silvia Anna Barrilà is an Italian fine arts journalist and regular contributor to the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 ORE (ArtEconomy24). She also writes about art, design, lifestyle and society for a number of Italian and international magazines, including DAMn Magazine and ICON (Mondadori). She is based in Milan and Berlin.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE

---

Milan’s fair for modern and contemporary art, MiArt, has a new artistic director: Vincenzo de Bellis. Former director Frank Boehm, a Milan-based German architect and consultant for Deutsche Bank Collection Italy, was in charge for only one year.

Already in the past the fair has been looking for a winning formula and has often made changes to the artistic direction—even if this discontinuity cannot be good for the event. And this is not the only adjustment at the head of an Italian fair this year. In Bologna, Silvia Evangelisti, who has been directing the local art fair Arte Fiera for nine years, was replaced by Giorgio Verzotti and Claudio Spadoni. In Turin, Francesco Manacorda left the direction of Turin’s art fair Artissima to Sarah Cosulich Canarutto, as he was called to the direction of Tate Liverpool.

According to the organizers of MiArt, the decision to dismiss Boehm from his position did not depend on the quality of his work. “The reality of the art system, which is getting more and more complex, made it necessary to rethink the role of the director itself,” MiArt’s organization told Auction Central News. “We need no longer a single professional, but a personality who is able to create a team of experts from different sectors, and to speak both to the Italian and to the international community.”

Thus, next to Vincenzo de Bellis as the artistic director, there will be a team composed by Andrew Bonacina, curator at the International Project Space in Birmingham; Florence Derieux, director of Frac Champagne-Ardenne in Reims; Fionn Meade, independent curator in New York; Alessandro Rabottini, external curator at GAMeC in Bergamo; Andrea Viliani, core agent at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel; and Donatella Volonté, responsible for the modern sector since the foundation of MiArt.

As far as the choice of Vincenzo de Bellis concerns, the organization says that de Bellis was invited to present a proposal, which was then accepted by the fair. “De Bellis represents an inherent figure in the art system: As co-director of the Milanese Peep-Hole art center, he is curator and entrepreneur; he is able to become a collector of different structures, and to underline the cultural function of the art fair, even without neglecting its undeniable commercial aspect.”

Auction Central News asked Vincenzo de Bellis to anticipate his plans for the next edition of MiArt, which will take place on April 5-7, 2013.

Q: You have stated that you want to start a process which brings MiArt to be active in the production of contemporary art during the whole year and not only during the three days of the fair. How do you want to realize this program?

A: The starting idea is to transform MiArt in a “sounding board” for events and projects which will be organized by the institutions in Milan and will happen during the same period as the fair. Later, we would like to start some programs and projects which will be produced and coordinated by MiArt in different times of the year, in accordance with institutions and galleries of the city.

Q: Which will be the role of the Italian and international experts who will join you? Have you chosen them?

A: Yes, they were all chosen by me. I strongly believe in team work and collaboration. Some of them are people I have collaborated with in the past, others are people I have known for a long time as professionals and now I have the occasion of working with them. Everyone of them was chosen for a specific reason and with the aim of working on a specific section of the next edition of MiArt.

Q: Can you anticipate something about the new sections of the fair?

A: For now I can tell you that the sections will be four. Two of them are the same as the last editions and two of them are new. Among these there is one that directly compares the modern and the contemporary segments, the two veins of MiArt.

Q: What do you think is liable for improvement compared to the 2012 edition and to the past editions of the fair?

A: The quality of the art on offer; the quality of the services offered both to the public, and to the exhibitors, and to the collectors. Another fundamental aspect is to generate the interest of the international art public, Milan is the heart of art in Italy and the city must aim in this direction.

Q: What are you going to do to involve international art dealers and collectors?

A: There will be a program specifically conceived for international collectors, with tours and visits to some pivotal places of the city (art institutions but also other places), and there will be also programs specifically conceived for international exhibitors, so that they come in contact with the public of Italian collectors, who are known internationally for being among the most active and attentive.

About Silvia Anna Barrilà:

Silvia Anna Barrilà is an Italian fine arts journalist and regular contributor to the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 ORE (ArtEconomy24). She also writes about art, design, lifestyle and society for a number of Italian and international magazines, including DAMn Magazine and ICON (Mondadori). She is based in Milan and Berlin.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

Walking through the corridors of the 43rd edition of ArtBasel, the most important fair for modern and contemporary art that has just closed in Basel, Switzerland, one could not help not to notice the presence of high-level Italian postwar art hanging at the booths of many important international dealers.

Major New York modern art dealers like Acquavella Galleries and Helly Nahmad showed works by Morandi, De Chirico, Fontana and Burri, the most sought-after Italian artists on the international level. Mirror works by Michelangelo Pistoletto were shown among others by Luhring Augustine (New York), Galleria Continua (San Gimignano, Beijing, Le Moulin), and Simon Lee Gallery (London). Gladstone Gallery had works by Alighiero Boetti, Mario and Marisa Merz, ceramics by Lucio Fontana, and sculptures by Fausto Melotti. Arte Povera was all around, as well. German gallery Konrad Fischer Galerie, for example, had works by Mario Merz and Giuseppe Penone, who is currently on show at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, as well. “We try to respond to the market request,” director of the gallery’s base in Düsseldorf Thomas W. Rieger tells us, “and the market now asks for Arte Povera.” The gallery sold a large sculpture by Penone. Works of such dimensions usually quote around 350,000 euros ($440,000).

Younger Italian artists were represented, as well. French gallery Emmanuel Perrotin presented a new work by Paola Pivi (1971), consisting of a chain of 40 plastic airplane models hanging from the ceiling, on sale for 70,000 euros ($88,000). From June 20 the Italian artist is on show in Central Park in New York with an installation promoted by the Public Art Fund, and at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.

New works by Italian star Francesco Vezzoli, showing a pair made of an antique portrait bust and a contemporary response made by him, were presented at Turin gallery Franco Noero and at French gallery Yvon Lambert. Each sculpture cost between $150,000 and $175,000.

An extensive presentation of Italian contemporary art through different generations was offered at the booth of Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, an Italian gallery based in Rome. The center of the booth was occupied by a work by Alberto Garutti, 1948, consisting of two glass jars full of water. Garutti represents almost a paternal figure to other artists shown in Basel, not only because he is older, but because he is a teacher at the Brera Academy in Milan and at the IUAV University in Venice. In his work Garutti puts the public space at the center of attention; art is used to connect people. And this is also the case of the work shown in Basel, which is part of a bigger installation made in the gallery in Rome. The water contained in the vases comes from a fountain in the courtyard of the gallery’s building, which is said to be the fountain where the she-wolf who rescued Romulus and Remus used to drink. It represents not only a link to the story of the city, and a primary need of humanity, but also an element that connects individuals and families in a building. To underline this fact the artist has reconstructed the plumbing system of tubes, which goes through the apartments in drawings and through an installation in the gallery. The price of each vase is 20,000 euros ($25,000).

Another generation of Italian art, younger than Garutti but already established, was represented in Basel by Massimo Bartolini (1962) and Elisabetta Benassi (1966). Bartolini’s research focuses on the relationship between the human being and the environment. In the series “Rugiada,” which means “dew,” Bartolini recreates the morning dew on monochrome paintings through drops of water mixed with silicon sprayed on the surface, thus combining the wonder of nature and the history of art in one (the work from the series on show in Basel was priced 13,000 euros or $16,500). Massimo Bartolini, like Penone, is currently on show at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel with the work Untitled (Wave), where he recreated the movement of a wave in a pond.

The younger generation was represented at the booth of Magazzino by Alessandro Piangiamore (1976), Daniele Puppi (1970), and Gianluca Malgeri (1974). Malgeri’s work Wunderkammer attracted a lot of attention. The installation, composed of branches resembling the deer’s antlers of a trophy, was inspired by the myth of Apollo and Daphne. It deals with the theme of love, but also of collecting art. It was sold for 15,000 euros ($19,000) to an international buyer. The works by Puppi and Piangiamore had a great commercial success, as well, and they were sold on the first day to international collectors: a real satisfaction for Italian young art, which succeeds in asserting itself for its quality despite the lack of a solid art system in its homeland.

About Silvia Anna Barrilà:

Silvia Anna Barrilà is an Italian fine arts journalist and regular contributor to the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 ORE (ArtEconomy24). She also writes about art, design, lifestyle and society for a number of Italian and international magazines, including DAMn Magazine and ICON (Mondadori). She is based in Milan and Berlin.

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---

MILAN, Italy – It was probably during a trip through southern Italy in the 4th century BC that the small late Egyptian stone known as “Horus on the Crocodiles” went missing. It was, by all appearances, a talisman against snakes, crocodiles, and scorpions owned by a traveler. Many centuries later, at the end of the 1970s, the object was recovered during a dig in the city of Crotone, in the region of Calabria, by a worker who recognized the rarity of the stone and decided to keep it.

The worker was so proud of it that he always carried it in a small bag hanging around his neck and used every opportunity to show it off, until someone stole it from him.

It was not until 35 years ago that journalistic research drew public attention to the stone. The regional detachment of the Carabinieri Department for the Protection of Cultural Heritage started an investigation that led to their locating the object in the Sforza Castle Collection in Milan. In February 2012 the stone was returned to the Archeological Museum of Crotone.

This is just one of several stories of recoveries achieved between 2001 and 2011 by the Calabrian Unit of the Carabinieri Department for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, based in the city of Cosenza. Thirteen of these stories are now the subject of an exhibition titled “Recoveries 2001-2011,” running at the National Gallery of Cosenza through May 6.

The exhibition aims not only to celebrate 10 years of activity of the regional unit of the Carabinieri, but also to call attention to the problem of illegal traffic of antiquities, which is aided by the general lack of transparency of the art market. The anonymity of art transactions, for instance, makes the illegal market of antiquities easier; some art dealers prefer to turn a blind eye to an object’s provenance in order to close the deal and because they do not want to lose their suppliers.

In the case of antiquities, it is even more complicated because they are often stolen directly from the archaeological sites and there is no record of them at all. However, the Italian security forces are very well organized in the fight against art crime. The Carabinieri units for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, established in 1969, are active throughout Italy and collaborate with international security forces abroad, with whom they have a very good reputation.

Besides the stone of Crotone, the exhibition includes the so-called Askos, a 5th century BC bronze oil jar in the shape of a siren, which was returned to Italy by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Its story is even more incredible than that of the Horus stone. After laying underground for 2,500 years, the Askos was found by some graverobbers who sold it to an intermediary for ten million lire (around $6,000), plus a cow. A collector later sold it to a Swiss art dealer for $400,000 who, in turn, sold it to the Getty Museum for $600,000. A long negotiation between the Getty Museum and the Italian government followed before the object came back to the place where it had been found.

This is not the only item coming from an American museum. There is a Greek amphora, as well, that Shelby White, a famous antiquities collector and a trustee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, had donated to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The amphora was returned to Italy in 2006 together with other archeological treasures.

The exhibition in Cosenza includes paintings, as well. Among them are three oil-on-canvas artworks painted by Neapolitan artists from the 17th and 18th centuries—namely “Still Life With Peacock and Turkey” by Paolo Porpora, “Flight into Egypt” by Francesco “Pacecco” de Rosa and “Minerva and Venus” by Paolo de Matteis—all of which were stolen from the house of Baron Sanseverino. The thieves entered the house during a night when nobody was in and stole the most part of the baron’s art collection. They tried to peddle the paintings through the Florence art market, but they were caught by the security forces.

Another painting, “Madonna of the Rest” by Giuseppe Pascaletti, was recovered in the studio of a restorer who had kept it for more then 10 years. When it comes to illegal art traffic it seems no one is beyond suspicsion. The 19th-century silver “Pelican Ciborium” was sold by the priest of the church where it was preserved. He stated he had done it for charity.

# # #

About Silvia Anna Barrilà:

Silvia Anna Barrilà is an Italian fine arts journalist and regular contributor to the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 ORE (ArtEconomy24). She also writes about art, design, lifestyle and society for a number of Italian and international magazines, including DAMn Magazine and ICON (Mondadori). She is based in Milan and Berlin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

---