The Masters of the Twentieth Century: from Guttuso to Vedova – Works from the Alberto Della Ragione collection

Exhibition Hours

From 29 July 2022 to 8 January 2023, the Centuripe Antiquarium hosts the exhibition The Masters of the Twentieth Century: from Guttuso to Vedova. Works from the Alberto Della Ragione collection curated by Sergio Risaliti, Director of the Museo Novecento.
The exhibition project was born from the collaboration between the Municipality of Centuripe and the Museo Novecento in Florence, with the aim of making available a selection of masterpieces exhibited for the first time in Sicily and coming from one of the most important collections dedicated to Italian art of the Twentieth century: the Alberto Della Ragione Collection.

By renewing the long and fruitful tradition of modern collecting, from which the most important museums in Florence were born, from the Uffizi to the Stefano Bardini Museum, Della Ragione contributed to feeding the founding nucleus of the Museo Novecento, which today preserves and exhibits this important collection.

Retracing the will of Alberto Della Ragione, the legacy goes beyond the city and regional borders to reach Sicily, in Centuripe, a city rich in history and custodian of important artistic and archaeological treasures. With a selection of works ranging from Renato Guttuso to Emilio Vedova, from Mario Mafai to Filippo de Pisis, the public will be able to admire about forty masterpieces by the brave patron who since the 1920s devoted himself to art, when still wary of production. of his time, he bought the first nineteenth-century works. His love for his contemporaries was sealed by a visit to the first Roman Quadrennial in 1931, which provoked in him a decisive rejection of the art of previous centuries. The collector thus responded to the ethical request of “not passing with eyes closed between the art of one’s time, but to give the work of the living artist the legitimate comfort of a timely understanding”, immediately motivated by anti-fascist ideals and by a reaction to the Regime’s cultural policy.

Second Futurism to Magic Realism. The works of the masters of the Roman and Corrente School also take on great prominence, with whom Della Ragione established not only professional relationships, but also real bonds of friendship. This is the case of Renato Birolli and Renato Guttuso, who, speaking of the collector, declared: “he knew how to give us what we needed: trust, friendship, he lived with us in the same passion, he burned with the same flame”.

Della Ragione thus began to offer its support to young artists, often neglected by the market and by official critics. Since then, his collection of contemporary art, which was already one of the largest in Italy in the 1940s, grew progressively. The collection reveals how the taste of the engineer-collector was however oriented, in the choice of artists and works, towards more traditional genres (including still life, portrait, landscape, female nude), which ensured a painting of reference, even unconscious, to his sometimes unscrupulous choices. Despite being determined to renew his vision of art, Della Ragione never totally denied figuration. In the more than two hundred works in the collection, themes dear to the history of modern art emerge, to which painters and sculptors adhered by offering provocative figurative solutions without ever going beyond the visual boundaries tested in previous eras.