Solo – Mario Mafai. Works from the Alberto Della Ragione Collection

Where and when

From

11July 2020

18December 2020

Museo Novecento

Second Floor

“Art is an ethical fact rather than an aesthetic one”
-Mario Mafai

Exhibition Hours

Summer Hours

Monday – Sunday

11:00 am

–

9:00 pm

Thursday

Winter Hours

Monday – Sunday

11:00 am

–

8:00 pm

Thursday

For the first time, the new appointment of the SOLO exhibition cycle, dedicated to the great artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is the result of a collaboration between the Museo Novecento and the SAGAS Department of the University of Florence. Two students of the master’s course in History of Contemporary Art, Stefania Delia Previti and Rebecca Ricci, worked with the museum staff and curated, together with the director of the Novecento Museum Sergio Risaliti and Stefania Rispoli, a monographic exhibition dedicated to Mario Mafai ( Rome 1902-1956). The exhibition is part of the Dall’ Aula al Museo project, launched last year together with prof. Giorgio Bacci, designed to bring the academic research sector closer to that of museum education and dissemination to the general public.

The exhibition offers a selection of works from the permanent collection of the museum that tells the central decades of the Roman painter’s career at the turn of the Second World War, underlining the link with Rome, his hometown, the recurrence of some subjects dear to him, the association with other artists and the political and social commitment in such difficult years for Italy and Europe under the Nazi-Fascist dictatorship.

Credits Leonardo Morfini.

Together with painters such as Renato Guttuso, Renato Birolli, Scipione and Corrado Cagli, Mafai represents one of the spearheads of the Alberto Della Ragione Collection. The twenty works in the collection testify to the intense relationship of esteem and friendship that bound the artist to Della Ragione and are a sign of the latter’s interest, an enlightened collector, for an art attentive to life but allied with emotions, close to real existence but also to dreams.

The exhibition presents the magnificent Self-portrait of the Twenties, a painting from the Demolitions series – images of the urban changes suffered by Rome to satisfy the vision of the new course of cultural policy under the regime -, two versions of the Dry Flowers series, a theme dear to Mafai who it cost him the nickname “Mario dei Fiori” and a group of Roman views tinged with a harsh and melancholy romanticism.

The Dall’Aula al Museo project will continue in the coming months with other monographic exhibitions dedicated to Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti and Arturo Martini that will be visible in the museum spaces and as special online projects.