A childhood reality and imagination populated by women nourished the art and existential reflections of Massimo Campigli, pseudonym of Max Ihlenfeld, throughout his life. Campigli discovered the passion and practice of painting after his move to Paris, but it was during a trip to Rome in 1928 that the painter was dazzled by Etruscan art. The artist thus found his signature style: dry painting recalling the fresco, with female figures closed in an icy temporal distance like distant divinities from a mysterious past.There is also room for figurative “classical” experimentation in the research of Lucio Fontana, the artist known for his revolutionary “cuts” in the canvas, who found his ideal medium in ceramics. Starting from 1937 the artist used this material to shape swift, vibrant volumes of creases and reflections. Captured in situations and moments of privacy or meditation, his models, too, seem like timeless divinities, made up of a material steeped in light, whimsical and, as it was defined, “Baroque”.In Italian art of the 1920s and 1930s the modernisation of the artistic languages also entered commercial art and advertising graphics. One of the masters of the affiche was Marcello Dudovich of Trieste, who in his dynamic and very elegant female figures interpreted the moods, trends and boldness of a generation of women yearning for emancipation. At the wheel of a sports car, on skis or on the beach, Dudovich’s women show the way of change and a possible alternative to the mother-wife model of the regime’s propaganda. The Florentine Alberto Magnelli’s Seated Woman is also independent and modern, boldly dressed in red. He moved to Paris and was in touch with the most advanced points of European art. In the 1920s Magnelli moved between abstraction and figuration, working with fields of intense, saturated colour that, in this case, shape the figure, solidly positioning her in a rarefied space.The exhibition finishes here. Banca D’Italia thanks you for visiting the “Verso la Modernità” exhibition, curated by Ilaria Sgarbozza and Anna Villari. See you soon!
