Two hundred years after its birth, Reggio Emilia at the Palazzo dei Musei, dedicates an extensive retrospective to Antonio Fontanesi, an artist from Reggio Emilia, the undisputed protagonist of Italian 19th-century painting, an extraordinary interpreter of the novelties of the romantic landscape, a restless man in life and an innovative experimenter in painting .

Promoted by the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia, in collaboration with the Turin Museums Foundation-Modern Art Gallery and the Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery of Piacenza, the exhibition is organized in partnership with the Emilia Romagna Region – Institute for Artistic Heritage Cultural and Natural, the Cassa di Risparmio P. Manodori Foundation of Reggio Emilia, Destinazione Emilia, Unioncamere Emilia Romagna, Chamber of Commerce of Reggio Emilia, APT Servizi, with the art bonus contribution of CAR SERVER, CREDEM, IREN.

The exhibition – curated by Virginia Bertone, Elisabetta Farioli, Claudio Spadoni – in addition to reconstructing the artist’s journey through the most important works by Fontanesi, intends to offer a new critical contribution to his knowledge by showing the influence his painting had in artists who after him recognized themselves in their particular approach to nature and the landscape, suspended between the need for representation of the true and the urgency to express their most intimate emotions.

On display, the exhibition of the most important paintings by Antonio Fontanesi from important museums and Italian collections will be compared with the production of the artists that critics have linked with his production, identifying possible reasons for inspiration in a chronological span from the years Eighties of the nineteenth comes up to the sixties of the twentieth century.
The relationships with symbolist and divisionist culture will be documented through works by Vittore Grubicy, Leonardo Bistolfi, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Angelo Morbelli but also his recovery in the 1920s by Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati, Arturo Tosi. The last section will be dedicated to the interesting critical interpretations of the fifties by Roberto Longhi and then by Francesco Arcangeli. The latter in fact, in identifying a continuity between the modern conception of art and the great nineteenth-century tradition, places Fontanesi in the evolution of a naturalism that after the war arrives to Ennio Morlotti, Mattia Moreni, Pompilio Mandelli, going as far as the material researches of Alberto Burri.

Info: www.musei.re.it/antonio-fontanesi-e-la-sua-eredita