Palazzo Citterio, Milan review — modernismo italiano, from Modigliani to Mussolini

It has taken 50 years, contributions or obstructions from 30 governments, countless stop-and-start interventions to its splendid baroque building — balconied facades, colonnaded courtyard, sumptuous stuccoed rooms — but this weekend, at last, Palazzo Citterio will open, giving Milan a stunning new gallery of modern art, packed with masterpieces. 

What will its icon be? “Riot in the Gallery” (1910), Umberto Boccioni’s sparkling stampede of fashionably dressed Milan shoppers as streaks of light and colour, competes with “Studio of Wonders” (1918-19), Mario Sironi’s vibrant jigsaw of tubes and cylinders. Amedeo Modigliani’s long-necked, almond-eyed beauties, sinuously rapturous as Botticellis — “Head of a Young Lady”, “Enfant Gras” (both 1915) — meet Carlo Carrà’s huge-headed chunky tennis player “Metaphysical Muse” (1917).  

There’s a welcome, too, for lesser-known names. From expressionist Antonietta Raphael, a rabbi’s daughter and friend of Chagall, comes a luscious twisting landscape “Archaeologic Walk” (1928). Take the path further towards magical realism and you are among the hieratic figures inspired by Etruscan art in Massimo Campigli’s gold-ground, enchanted “The Garden” (1936). 

Italian modernism is underplayed in museums and obscure globally. Its presentation and interpretation are of enormous interest, including politically

The Italian state bought Palazzo Citterio in 1972 as an extension for the adjacent Pinacoteca Brera, Milan’s venerable Old Master museum. During the lengthy wait for its restoration, exceptional donations from collectors Emilio Jesi and Lamberto Vitali arrived and languished in storage or cramped glass display boxes. These gifts are the heart of the outstanding 1900-1950s collection moving into Palazzo Citterio’s piano nobile, while “La Fiumana” (1898), Giuseppe Pellizza’s rarely seen four-metre painting celebrating a worker’s revolt, occupies the floor below. With the Pinacoteca, Palazzo Citterio is now pivotal to the “Grande Brera” complex in Milan’s plush Design District, and much enhances it.  

Italian modernism is underplayed in the country’s major museums, and obscure globally. As the 20th century retreats into history, its presentation and interpretation are of enormous interest, including politically. This is especially true of the metaphysical painter-poets, going beyond reality to the essence of things, concerned with what TS Eliot called “the direct sensuous apprehension of thought”. Favoured by Jesi and a fascinating strength of Citterio’s collection, they flourished through the first world war and Mussolini’s rule, and have not escaped taints of fascism — though Jesi was Jewish and supported artists struggling under the regime.

Sironi’s awkward mannequin in high heels disconsolately switching on the light of modernity in “The Lamp” (1917) encapsulates metaphysical ambiguities, jumbling realities, setting cubist dislocations within a nostalgic, regretful atmosphere. Patron and art critic Margherita Sarfatti (a mistress of Mussolini) proclaimed that good Italian painting “consists in not renouncing the modern, while attempting to infuse it with the eternal”, creating “a new tradition worthy of Italy’s ancient past”. Artists felt and fought that weight, lending Italian modernism singular tension and allusiveness. 

At Citterio, futurism’s first roar — Boccioni’s sketch of horses rearing around a construction site “The City Rises” (1910) — contrasts with more nuanced early avant-garde Italian approaches. Ardengo Soffici brought Florentine elegant linearity to cubism in “Watermelon and Liqueurs” (1914), fruit and bottle against ripples of newsprint and menus. His Tuscan friend Ottone Rosai sent a carpentry workshop spinning in “The Joiner’s Bench” (1914), but anchored it in realistic objects opulently rendered. 

Carrà shifted within a decade from futurist tradition-smashing abstraction — the dynamic interlocking planes “Rhythms of Objects” (1911) — to tableaux of faceless dummies casting eerie shadows, stand-ins for historical figuration, such as the tailor’s model and sailor-suited doll in “Mother and Son” (1917), then retreated to austere archaism in the statuesque nude “The House of Love” (1922).

Morandi too ventured cubist experiments: cutting out flat shapes then reassembling them to stand on a pedestal in the brilliantly curious “Metaphysical Still Life with Triangle” (1919). But by 1920, in the lemon-gold “Still Life”, he settled on the refined classical simplicity of arrangements of vessels, studying relationships between volume and space, in chromatic harmonies such as the 1928 rose-brown “Still Life”. 

Although some artists supported fascism, Sironi, who worked for the regime, insisted all were free and individualistic within a broad humanist project: “in this gathering of values coming straight from the trenches there was no political intention whatsoever. Each one was what they wanted to be.” He began as a futurist, though his lovingly deconstructed “The Truck” (1914) is static and melancholy. The lorry reappears, put back together, emblem of long distance loneliness, in the vista of dark roads and looming apartment blocks of “Urban Landscape with Truck” (1919–20) that inaugurates Sironi’s wasteland series. This mirrors, the museum says, “a sense of alienation which is that of humanity itself”.

Suspended between real and unreal, transcribed with nervous broken strokes likened by the Italian poet Eugenio Montale to “fly foot” painting, Filippo de Pisis’s still lives are a high point of pittura metafisica — intimate, vital, full of wonder, destabilising as things are torn from their natural settings: juicy clams and shells impossibly posed on tilting squares in “Marine Still Life with Scampi” (1926); dead fish disrupting a display of ornamental vase and picture in “The Sacred Fish” (1924). 

“Sometimes a chicken feather, a poor dusty feather picked up from the street and contemplated in a moment of grace, can become the spark for a beautiful painting . . . full of that secret spirit that feels like eternity,” de Pisis wrote. “Marine Still Life with Feather” (1953), painted in the asylum where he ended his days, is that painting: an apocalyptic seascape focused on a single lovely, forlorn feather on a grey beach. 

Surveying these restless pictures is Marino Marini’s scarred plaster figure “Miracle (Gothic Cathedral)” (1943), an archaic-looking sculpture speaking of fragmentation, but sharing the solemn grace of quattrocento paintings such as those in the Pinacoteca. De Pisis’s “San Moisè” (1930), a teeming church facade, stones animated like fleeting figures, and Osvaldo Licini’s “Rebel Angel with White Moon” (1955), a calligraphic figure dancing along a tightrope, are similarly continuous with that spiritual sensibility. So Pinacoteca Brera and Palazzo Citterio enhance each other, persuasively arguing for art’s continuities rather than modernism as rupture. 

Director Angelo Crespi, appointed in January by Giorgia Meloni’s then culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano with the mandate to launch Citterio pronto, believes the Grande Brera can now become “one of the very great institutions globally”. It is certainly well placed — via Monte Napoleone, just named the world’s most expensive shopping street, is round the corner — and distinctive. As too many modern museums evolve into identikit white cubes, with homogenised international offerings, the Grande Brera stands out: cohesive, powerful national collections in starry old buildings.

Crespi is an outspoken traditionalist, “against the ideological power of curators and against the provocation at all costs inherent in conceptual art, where the ugly and the senseless often dominate”. He wants instead “the beauty that emanates from ancient art and the art of tradition, in which knowhow is preferred to concepts”. Palazzo Citterio embodies that uncompromising vision. 

Palazzo Citterio opens to the public on December 8

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