The Gazes of the Twentieth Century. Italian Drawings from the Interwar Years is the new exhibition now on at the Uffizi’s Department of Prints and Drawings.
Held in the Sala Edoardo Detti, the exhibition comprises of 37 prints and drawings from the interwar period. Most of the works have never been seen before by the public and date to the early 1900s, selected from a sizeable collection purchased by or donated to the Uffizi’s Department of Prints and Drawings between 2004 and 2015.
Giovanni Costetti (Reggio Emila, 1874 – Settignano, 1949), Profile of Giuseppe Lanza del Vasto, 1926.
Artists on show include Anders Zohn, Giannino Marchig, Marino Marini and Primo Conti among others. Their preferred subject matter is the human face, with a tendency towards portraiture with piercing psychological introspection.
The exhibition emphasizes the Department of Prints and Drawings’ desire to aspire towards the modern as well as the intense local artistic production in Tuscany between the two World Wars, focusing on realism, the avant-garde and figurative traditions.
Ruggero Alfredo Michahelles known as RAM (Florence, 1898- 1976), The Model, 1920 c.
The portraits on display in this exhibition, are dramatic and distant, varied and vacillating.
At the press conference Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi, commented, “The invention of photography, the new languages of the abstract arts of the avant-garde and the human catastrophes of the twentieth century basically changed twentieth-century portraiture. These works, presented for the first time in this exhibition, given that they are on paper and are therefore more delicate, are some of the lesser known in the Uffizi’s collection, the oldest and richest collection of self-portraits in the world.”
Gazes of the 20th Century press preview with Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi (far left)
The beautiful single-room exhibition space on the first floor of the Uffizi is hosting the show from May 17 to September 4, 2016.
