Artists at the Theater - Museo Novecento

Where and when

From

19July 2018

4November 2018

Museo Novecento

First Floor

Drawings for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino:
the theater seen through the eyes of some of the greatest artists of the short century.
The second exhibition of the cycle dedicated to drawing as the “mother of all arts” from 19 July to 4 November at the Museo Novecento.

Exhibition Hours

Summer Hours

Monday – Sunday

11:00 am

–

9:00 pm

Thursday

After “The sculptor’s drawing”, which inaugurated the new season of the Museo Novecento, with the exhibition “Artists at the Theater” – conceived by the artistic director of the Sergio Risaliti Museum, created thanks to the collaboration with the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Foundation and curated by Moreno Bucci – a selection of sketches, sketches and models signed by some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century for the Teatro del Maggio will be presented to the public.

During the twentieth century, drawing entered the practice of many artists by right, acquiring ever greater autonomy. In recent decades, many museums have devoted attention to this medium, on the one hand recognizing an increasingly less marginal role in drawing within artistic historiography, on the other hand making it a key to reading and interpreting the work of many artists and various currents.

From Gino Severini to Enrico Prampolini and Mario Sironi, from Bob Wilson to Derek Jarman, from Fausto Melotti to Giulio Paolini, from Toti Scialoja to Franco Angeli, from Piero Dorazio to Piero Sadun and Giacomo Manzù. An overview of drawings and models, now preserved in the Historical Archive of the Theater, which these protagonists of art created to accompany the performances of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino from 1933 to 1999.

Artists at the Theatre, sets up in the rooms on the first floor of the Museo Novecento, intends to investigate the practice of drawing for music, melodrama and ballet in the twentieth century. A practice that renews the tradition inaugurated in Florence by Bernardo Buontalenti, a multifaceted artist who already in the sixteenth century put his creativity at the service of the Medici court theater. A Renaissance tradition developed in the following centuries, which found fertile humus in the twentieth century and in the contemporary world.

In fact, there were many sculptors and painters who in the short century were called to review the theater from a different perspective, thanks to a sensitivity that left the Florentine theater a heritage of works of art in miniature, then transferred to the stage by skilled workers.

Today’s selection allows you to come into direct contact with the inspiration of the painters and sculptors involved and to grasp the germinal moment of the artistic invention that contributed to making some of the staging of May memorable, from Amfiparnaso by Orazio Vecchi (1933 ), for which Gino Severini thought of costumes, of the abstract inventions of Piero Dorazio for Rideau Réversible by Goffredo Petrassi and Igor Stravinsky (1980); from the Lombards to Giuseppe Verdi‘s First Crusade in 1948, which saw the collaboration of Mario Sironi for sets and costumes, to the irreverent creations by Derek Jarman for Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1982).