Mario Sironi. Synthesis and grandeur

Until March 27, 2022, the Museo del Novecento in Milan hosts a large and in-depth retrospective that traces the work of Mario Sironi sixty years after his death. “Mario Sironi. Synthesis and grandeur ", curated by Elena Pontiggia and Anna Maria Montaldo, director of the Museo del Novecento, in collaboration with Andrea Sironi-Strausswald (Mario Sironi Association, Milan) and Romana Sironi (Mario Sironi Archive of Romana Sironi, Rome).

The 110 works on display reconstruct Sironi's entire artistic career: from the youthful symbolist season to adherence to futurism; from his original interpretation of metaphysics in 1919 to the classical moment of the Italian twentieth century; from the expressionist crisis of 1929-30 to the monumental painting of the 1930s; until the Second World War and the Apocalypse painted shortly before his death. In fact, some masterpieces that have not appeared in a Sironian anthology for almost half a century are exhibited (the fascinating "Pandora", 1921-1922; "Paese nella valle", 1928; "Case e Alberi", 1929; "L ' watered ", 1929-30), and others completely unpublished.

Widely represented in the exhibition is the cycle of urban landscapes, Sironi's most famous theme, which acquires intensity after his arrival in Milan in 1919 and expresses both the drama of the modern city and a powerful will to build, in every sense. Among these the well-known "Synthesis of urban landscape", 1921; "The Cathedral", 1921; "Urban landscape with the tram" 1925-28, from the Museo del Novecento, exhibited at the 1928 Venice Biennale; "la Periferia" of 1943. A large group of works, however, testifies to Sironi as an interpreter of the human figure: the Pierfranceschiano "Nudo" of 1923, a favorite of Margherita Sarfatti; the mysterious "Woman with a vase" from 1924; the "Fisherman", 1925; "The fairy of the mountain", 1928; the "Niobide" of 1931, and the painful "Lazzaro", 1946, where, for the first time in the thousand-year iconography of the subject, Sironi paints a Lazarus who does not rise again, symbol of the collapse of all his ideas, starting with fascism in he had believed.

Monumental masterpieces such as the luminous "Winged Victory", the gigantic study for the main hall of the Sapienza University of Rome, the visionary "Condottiero on horseback" (all made in 1935) and the powerful preparatory study, almost six meters long, of the "Justice Corporativa "(1937-38), testify to his connection to mural painting in the Thirties, to which ample space is dedicated in the exhibition itinerary.

The "journey" in Sironi's art comes to an end in the last rooms that document the artist's dramatic final years, also tormented by the loss of his daughter Rossana, who took her own life in 1948 at the age of eighteen.... read the rest of the article»