GX1993.194

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 296; Larghezza: 275; Profondità: 280

legno di rovere scolpito e intarsiato

Having become the owner of the Ducal Palace in Guastalla in 1896, the entrepreneur Flavio Mossina – already living in the Congo, where he began to develop his passion for exoticism – began a series of restoration works on the building, to make it his home and the headquarters of the "Trancerie Mossina" company, one of the first and most important plywood factories in Italy. Among the rooms he designed, mention must be made of the Egyptian Room, from which the furnishings preserved at the Wolfsoniana come, and whose decorative apparatus – commissioned from the Orientalist painter Fabio Fabbi, the probable author of the project perhaps together with his brother Alberto, – was executed around 1917 by the painter and architect Tommaso Aroldi, who trained between 1885 and 1892 at the academies of Parma and Florence, where he was a pupil of Giovanni Fattori.
The Nineveh dresser and pyramidal bed exemplarily document the visionary and imaginative Orientalist spirit that stamped the chamber's artistic features: a pastiche that combined exotic and historicist suggestions from different eras and geographic areas, as attested by the extravagant figurative inventions of the woodwork elements on deposit at the Wolfsoniana, depicting myths and legends of kings, pharaohs, gods and heroes, set in remote moors, from the Far East to Latin America, recreating a seductive and imaginative exotic atmosphere. The reference to ancient Egypt, evoked in the monumental pyramidal headboard of the bed, dialogued, in the context of this sumptuous Orientalist reconstruction, with the fantastic view in the front of the dresser of the city of Nineveh, an ancient urban center on the left bank of the Tigris in northern Mesopotamia.
The peculiar aspect of the Egyptian Room in the Ducal Palace of Guastalla, however, is represented above all by the fact that-although at the time it was very much in vogue to propose, alongside historicist furnishings, oriental-style lounges, generically referred to by the term "Moorish" and habitually equipped with a fumoir – this room was intended not for social sharing, but for a more intimate and family-like enjoyment. A wooden bed richly decorated with ivory and semi-precious stone inlays, characterised by a monumental structure and a pyramid-shaped headboard, echoing ancient Egypt, surrounded by walls and towers.

GG2007.22

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 90; Larghezza: 130; Unità di misura: UNR; Unità di misura: UNR

legno di noce nazionale meridionale; inserti in acciaio, alluminio, vetro

A notary by profession and a great lover of literature, Fasce designed the autonomous table Autarca to allow the family to eat meals without the presence of servants and thus finally be free to speak openly in an era characterized by obsessive political control and the tangible threat of denunciation. Inspired by its basic function—complete “convivial” self-sufficiency—its name recalled one of the most officiated precepts of the civil liturgy of fascism: autarchy.
Fascist autarkic policy officially began in March 1936, in response to sanctions imposed by the League of Nations on November 18, 1935, following Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. However, mobilization in favor of economic independence and in support of national production had begun to emerge in the years following the economic crisis of 1929, which had led to the protectionist policies consolidated by the economic blockade imposed by Geneva. A relentless propaganda campaign, characterized by visually striking graphics, famous slogans (“We will go straight ahead” or “Italy will do it alone”) and highly appealing exhibitions, such as the Autarchic Exhibition of Italian Minerals, was deployed to promote Italian products and counteract the harmful effects of the embargo. Autarchy, which for some time seemed to contribute to the consolidation of the regime's image—distracting public opinion from the critical issues of its political action and its authoritarian and dictatorial nature—favored above all the search for new materials, offering an extraordinary field of experimentation for the most innovative trends in Italian design. Patented in 1936 with the definition of “Table containing everything necessary for serving meals,” the Autarca offers six diners the opportunity to enjoy a full meal without the assistance of service staff. The most unique feature of the large round table was its complex internal mechanism of weights and counterweights which, thanks to a transmission belt and a crank, allowed the central rotating part to be raised and lowered, giving diners direct access to special compartments and doors containing food that had been cooked in advance and kept warm by electric hotplates. Lunch could therefore be eaten without having to get up and without the help of service staff, as each diner found the necessary items from the original set in the shelves and drawers in front of their place, consisting of red earthenware plates from Richard-Ginori; coffee cups and saucers, toothpick holders and cutlery rests in red Bakelite with the ‘Standard’ logo; embroidered linen placemats indicating the table settings; specially printed menus with the name and graphic outline of the table; and, finally, glasses with fluted rims from the ‘Francesca’ service.

87.1111.6.1

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 72,5; Larghezza: 63; Profondità: 50

gesso

In the preparatory sketches 'Life and Death. Towards Light' made by Bistolfi for the Abegg tomb in Zurich, similarities can be discerned with the image of “L'Alpe” from his funeral monument for Giovanni Segantini in Saint-Moritz (1899-1906). The work, with the dedication engraved on the base “To my friend Perrod”, a collector of Piedmontese art, represents the plastic detail of the full-length plaster model, kept in the Museo Civico in Casale Monferrato and exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1914. A marble version of this bust also exists at the Museum of Italian Art in Lima.
In the seductive female figure emerges the artist's adherence to the stylistic features of Art Nouveau, a term with which, taking its name from the London atelier of Arthur Lasenby Liberty, the art nouveau style was defined in Italy. In this preparatory plaster sketch for the Abegg tomb in Zurich, one finds the expression of an innovative plastic relationship with space. The half-length female figure turns her head upwards with a delicate twist of the neck.

GG1998.1

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 72; Larghezza: 60; Profondità: 66

legno di noce lamellare curvato

Quinta Esposizione internazionale delle arti decorative e industriali moderne - Milano, Palazzo dell’Arte - 6 maggio 1933

Vietti presented at the 5th Milan Triennale in 1933 his armchair model, already used in the furnishings of the Andrea Doria maritime station in Genoa, which had been operational for a few months but was officially inaugurated on 28 October 1933. Made of curved laminated plywood, the chair was inspired by the famous cantilever chairs in birch and plywood that Finnish architect Alvar Aalto had designed starting in 1929 and which were exhibited in the Finnish section at the following Triennale in 1936. These armchairs coexisted with rationalist furniture in the living room of the flat for a family, located on the fifth floor, of the Abitazione tipica a struttura di acciaio, presented by the group of Ligurian architects led by Luigi Vietti and Luigi Carlo Daneri and including Fineschi, Zappa, Morozzo della Rocca, Vicoli, Crosa di Vergagni and Haupt. The simple, functional form and choice of material made the design of this armchair perfect for industrial mass production. This attention to new production processes characterised Vietti's overall proposal, as Luigi Carlo Daneri did not fail to emphasise: “The furniture is interesting for the presence of numerous pieces of furniture that can be dismantled and stacked, to be arranged according to the needs and wishes of the occupant; the cupboards are all of a single type for standardised production and can be both placed side by side and on top of each other”. Walnut armchair of rationalist design.

GX1993.462

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 159; Larghezza: 129.5

olio su tela

When Dottori painted Mario Carli's Air Portrait in 1931, also titled "An Italian of Mussolini", the Futurist writer and activist had by then become an official figure of the regime and was later appointed consul first in Porto Alegre in Brazil and then in Salonika. However, his existential and artistic path had been a bumpy one, revealing the many contradictions inherent in the historical evolution of Fascism. After making his debut in Florence, before the war, as an author of experimental, almost pre-surrealist novels, Carli was one of the leading exponents of Arditism, a phenomenon typical of the original fascist movementism, which proposed the figure of a "new man" intolerant of all rules and conventions, violent and anarchic, radical and provocative, daring and unscrupulous, a man, in short, with ‘the heart of a dynamo, pneumatic lungs, the liver of a leopard’. Animated by these ideals, Carli enlisted as a volunteer in 1917 and was wounded and decorated. He went with D'Annunzio to Fiume and there launched "La Testa di Ferro", the press organ of the Fiuman legionnaires. He was put on trial and arrested several times. To open the way for revolution, he was open to socialist and communist experiences and models, which aroused the suspicions of Marinetti and Mussolini. Following the crisis of Arditism and after the march on Rome, he founded the magazine "L'Impero" with the aim of bringing together the most innovative forces of Futurism and outlining a new culture suited to the prospects of Fascism, until Mussolini, by then consolidated in power and purged the initial subversive spirit of the movement, harnessed it in officialdom to render it inoffensive.

GX1993.396

Unità di misura: cm; Diametro: 56

vetro dipinto e piombato

Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna - Torino, Parco del Valentino - 10/05/1902 – 10/11/1902<br>Famiglia Artistica - Milano

'[...] the hideous image, which the serpents coiled iridescently, is held suspended by the hand of Perseus and stands out red-hot against the sky in all its petrified terror. Already exhibited at the Famiglia Artistica in Milan, it received confirmation of its success in Turin'. With these words, Alfredo Melani commented in September 1902 on the participation of the leaded glass tondo - made by Guido Zuccaro, on a cartoon by Giovanni Buffa, for the G. Beltrami Vetrate Artistiche in Milan - at the First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin.
In discontinuity with the past experiences of historicist matrix, this exhibition, whose official programme foresaw, in the name of a total adhesion to modernity, the strict exclusion of works marked by "simple imitations of styles of the past", represented the first exhibition of international scope organised in Italy after unification.
The leaded glass roundel, made in 1901, is signed with the glassworks' trademark, composed of the initials of the four partners: Beltrami, Buffa, Zuccaro and Innocenzo Cantinotti. The Medusa stained-glass window, however, was executed by Zuccaro alone on a cartoon by Buffa. Adhering to a strand of research that was very much in vogue at the time, in which the model of the demonic and mutant woman - in its disturbing physiognomic correspondence with the animal world - had by then taken over from the traditional angelic and idealised female portrait, this painted and leaded glass tondo presented clear expressive and iconographic analogies with the literary and mythological transpositions of international Symbolist culture, from Franz von Stuck to Gustave Moreau. Glass globe depicting the severed head of Medusa.