Museum Folkwang Essen
September 2018
September 28, 2018–January 13, 2019
Uncannily Real: Italian Paintings of the 1920s presents more than eighty paintings from Realismo Magico, an Italian art movement marked by evocative images of disturbing beauty. After the First World War, there was an increasing desire for calm and order, and to make sense of a world ravaged by tragedy, or, at the very least, to accept its contradictions. Out of this context, Germany witnessed the evolution of Neue Sachlichkeit, in France there were multiple neoclassical tendencies, and Italy saw the emergence of Realismo Magico.
When Mussolini came to power in 1922, art began to evolve against the backdrop of a society marked by fascism. It may have been due to the political situation of those years that the ambiguities of these fascinating paintings, which all too often trigger uneasiness in the viewer, received relatively little attention in recent decades.
This exhibition provides the first-ever broad overview of Realismo Magico in Germany, featuring outstanding works by the main protagonists of the movement, ranging from Antonio Donghi, Felice Casorati, Gino Severini, and Edita Broglio through to more well-known artists such as Giorgio Morandi, Giorgio de Chirico, and Carlo Carrà. Realismo Magico is not a group of artists, but an artistic stance. The art historian Franz Roh described the phenomenon in 1925: “With ‘magical’ as opposed to ‘mystical,’ the aim is to suggest that the mystery does not enter the world being represented, but remains behind it.”