In the outstanding rooms of one of the most important noble and baroque palaces in Turin, Palazzo Barolo, the exhibition from Monet to Picasso was showed with masterpieces from the Johannesburg Art Gallery in South Africa.
The exhibition displayed the original works of some of the most important artists of the art history of all the time including: Monet, Signac, Courbet, Degas, Cézanne, Sisley, Derain, Picasso, Matisse, Rossetti, Modigliani, Bacon, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Kentridge.
The Johannesburg Art Gallery, place of the biggest art collection in the south hemisphere with more than 9000 works of art, exhibits just the 10% of its collections in the 15 rooms of the museum while the rest is placed on rotation in the warehouse or loaned for world tour exhibitions.
The initial collection was put together by Sir Hugh Lane, and exhibited in London in 1910 before being brought to South Africa.
Florence, Lady Phillips, an art collector and wife of mining magnate Lionel Phillips, established the first gallery collection using funds donated by her husband.
In 1882, Lionel was appointed President of the Chamber of Mines, acquiring an extreme power and following some political interests that will involve him personally in the “Jameson Raid”, the failed British attempt to botch a raid against the South African Republic.
Philipps gave himself up to the police in the hope to obtain the pardon, he was condemned to death, but after six months of confinement, he was exiled in England.
Florence, who was travelling a lot in that time, came back to stay close to her husband and followed him in London in a house in Grosvenor Square.
Here in London, Lady Phillips started to feel some interest for art and begin to acquire some works of the contemporary artists of the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century.
Among the artist selected by Lady Phillips we can find some of the Impressionists as Claude Monet, Camille Pisarro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley but also the Italians Giovanni Boldini and Antonio Martini painters of two beautiful portraits of Lady Phillips and Dante Gabriele Rossetti, Amedeo Modigliani, Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso.
The desire of Florence Phillips, once she started the collection, was to provide for her faraway South Africa where she intended to come back with her husband once she will get the opportunity.
For this reason, she planned to build a museum that could host the works she was buying a little bit at time.
In 1906 the couple established themselves in Johannesburg ,where the Johannesburg Art Gallery JAG was built and under the supervision of Hugh Lane, his first director. He flanked Lady Phillips in the choice of the artists to be selected and in the works to acquire.
Lady Florence soon realised the power of art, not only in a cultural level but also in a social one. She was certain that art could be a useful instrument for the local population, especially the poor one.
For this reason, the Johannesburg Art Gallery was created as a public gallery with an international background.
The Gallery was opened in 1910 but it was only in 1940 that became the first South African museum to purchase a work of a black artist with the Yellow Houses by Gerard Sekoto. This starts to fill the absence of local artist, allow to show to European the African art and to fight through art the racism prevalent in the country of the apartheid.
This was a long and difficult process to be finalised and to see more acquisitions of local artists it would take more the 32 years, in the 1970s.
In the first room, the exhibition showed the Nineteen century English art scene that it is well represented in the collection due to the strong connection the society who built the art gallery have with the British and for the donations of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite art that enriched the collection.
In the first room was displayed the work of one of the most fashion artists of the Victorian era, Lawrence Alma-Tadema. He was famous for his portraits in Egyptian, Greek and Roman style that were inspired by a classicism of manner with an accurate archaeological reconstruction.
The work The Death of the Pharaoh’s Firstborn Son,1858, is a refined a melancholic scene based in an obscure and imaginary Egypt where the personal tragedy of the Pharaoh and his wife is achieved without pathetic tone but with great attention to the silent and resignation of the moment.
The next painter was the protagonist of the Romantic period William Turner, who used the landscape to show the powerful sublime nature. Here is displayed one of his watercolours depicting the mountain landscape and castle in Hammerstein, Looking down the River Rhine from near Andernach.
The following paintings were by two of the most famous Pre-Raphaelites: John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Millais in Stitch! Stitch!! created an intime portrait of his wife Effie Gray, distracted while she was sewing and touched by a translucent light that stands out her beautiful blue eyes and the delicacy of her features.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted in this small painting Regina Cordium (Queen of Hearts) his wife Elisabeth (Lizzie) Siddal.
Lizzie Siddal was the favourite model of some of the most famous Pre-Raphaelites because she personified their idea of femininity. She was depicted by Hunt and Millais who immortalised her in the famous Ophelia but she was the regular model and pupil of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who felt in love with and married in 1860.
Regina Cordium is also the first painting that depicted Lizzie with the new style of Rossetti experimented in Bocca Baciata, portraying single women, painted from the bust up and surrounded by flowers, jewellery, and other symbolic objects.
Regina Cordium imitated playing card with a gold background full of red hearts.
The flower she is holding, the wild pansy, was a symbol of the thought of the lovers in the Victorian period, maybe it was used to symbolised the fragilities of Lizzie due to her weak health and depression, that caused two years later her suicide for a dose of laudanum.
The second section of the exhibition is dedicated to the French scene of the 19th century: Millet, Corot, Guillaumin, Fantin-Latour, the sea landscapes by Eugéne Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind, Edgar Degas (The dancers), Claude Monet (The Spring) and Alfred Sisley.
Sisley painted the Seine riverside in his work Riverside in Veneux that show the extraordinary sensibility of the artist in drawing the atmospheric sense, painted with a refined nuances of colours and organised with a composition well defined and structured. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé, a well-educated expert of art wrote about him “Sisley seizes the passing moments of the day; watches a fugitive cloud and seems to paint it in its flight; on his canvas the live air moves and the leaves yet thrill and tremble”.
The other paintings in the room are from the Post Impressionists with names such as Cézanne and Van Gogh, but also artist as Signac, Vuillard and Bonnard.
The third section is about a more recent part of the collection of the Twenty century.
Painters of the first decades of the 20th Century from Derain to Picasso, from Modigliani till Matisse.
The route entered in the post-war section with works of the most important artist of the international scene: the British Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, and the famous American Pop art artists Roy Lichtenstein with Blonde e Andy Warhol, with the tryptic dedicated to Joseph Beuys.
Ideally to close the exhibition is the section that show the art developed in the 20th century in South Africa.
In particularly, we can see the works by Kentridge, Maggie Laubser, one of the members of the South African Expressionism and paintings by Maude Summer, Selby Mvusi and Geoge Pemba, painters with strong social interests that tell the tradition of the country but also the everyday life and the reality of the Apartheid.
George Pemba in Kwa Stemele illustrates an illegal meeting place used by a group of Africans to play music and dance despite the ban on such activities for their community.
The exhibition allowed the general public to discover the fascinating history of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and to give the opportunity to see masterpieces not easily to be seen.
As Vuyisile Mshudulu, director Arts, Cultures and Traditions City of Johannesburg, explained: “this exhibition is not an exception: is a way for South Africa, and particularly for Johannesburg, to communicate with other cities of the world through this prestigious art collection”.
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