Canaletto, Cézanne, Corot, Degas, Delacroix, Gauguin, Guardi, Manet, Modigliani, Monet, Renoir, Strozzi, Van Gogh. These are the protagonists of the exhibition curated by the director of MASI Tobia Bezzola, which presents a selection of extraordinary works of the nineteenth and 1936th century from the Emil Bührle Collection. Established between 1956 and XNUMX by the entrepreneur Emil Bührle, it represents one of the most important nuclei of works of the French Impressionist movement in the world.
The exhibition offers the opportunity to admire nuclei of paintings by Manet, Degas, Monet and Cézanne, relating to the various phases of their artistic production. Exemplary in this sense is the choice of works by Claude Monet which marks the salient stages of his biographical and artistic journey: the landscape painted en plein air by Champ de coquelicots près de Vétheuil (1879 ca.), the place where the artist he took refuge to escape the economic problems that afflict him, he proved to be the ideal place to experiment with painting en plein air and achieve full autonomy of expression in his brushstrokes; Le jardin de Monet in Giverny (1895) testifies to the newfound family and economic serenity; Waterloo Bridge (1899-1901), in the cold shades of blues and yellows, testifies to the influence of Turner and Whistler, whose works Monet discovered during his stays in London; Le bassin aux nymphéas, reflets verts (1920–1926), a revolutionary canvas in which the hierarchy between the various parts of the painting totally decays, establishes a pictorial anticipation of lyrical abstraction and abstract expressionism. Paintings that tell the importance of Monet not only as a reference figure for the Impressionist movement but also as a source of inspiration for subsequent generations. The compositional and chromatic intuitions of the Impressionists find fertile ground in the pictorial experiments of younger painters and their influence becomes tangible in the masterpieces of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Modigliani: in the cancellation of the geometric planes and in the vivid shades of Gauguin, in the chromatic harmonies that overturn the compositional realism of Van Gogh and the geometrized anatomy of the female nude by Modigliani. Originally from Germany, where he was born in 1890, Emil Bührle settled in Switzerland in 1924. Since 1936 he has dedicated himself to collecting, showing a clear interest in the works of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist current, managing to acquire, in addition to the aforementioned iconic works, masterpieces such as La petite Irène by Renoir (1880), Le Garçon au gilet rouge (1888-1890) by Cézanne and Danseuses au foyer (1889 ca.) and the bronze figure of the Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (1880-1881) by Degas, all present on show. Around this impressionist nucleus, which constitutes the fulcrum of the Collection, Bührle collects a set of works for a total of almost 600 works, ranging from medieval sculpture to Cubism.
The selected works, together with a series of documents exhibited in the introductory section, illustrate the relationships and negotiations entertained by Bührle with the art dealers and the principles according to which his astonishing collection was formed: on the one hand the desire to put in relation to modern art with the highest achievements of European painting of previous centuries - represented in the exhibition by masterpieces by Canaletto, Strozzi, Delacroix and Corot - on the other hand the commitment to exhaustively document the path of the protagonists of art modern. The exhibition thus underlines the idea of “enlightened” collecting, aimed at underlining the indissoluble relationships between past and present, illustrating the contribution of each painter to the history of art and the correspondences existing between artistic movements of different eras.
