8 major exhibitions around Italy and beyond, for an autumn defined by art in all its forms: painting, sculpture and performance.
**Autumn** brings the resumption of every activity, along with a rich **new cultural offering in our cities**. Here are the art exhibitions we think you shouldn't miss over the coming months. Painting, photography, but also ceramics and performance, to suit the tastes of lovers of every expressive form. A tour through exhibitions by well-known or rediscoverable artists, travelling across Italy through museums and galleries.
An iconic and widely admired artist, Edvard Munch has returned to Milan after 40 years. In the meantime, his fame has grown — especially on account of the painting everyone associates with him, The Scream, which will not, however, be on display at Palazzo Reale, at least not in the form everyone knows. What you will find instead is one of the many lithographs he made featuring the screaming figure, equally evocative. But there will be much else to strike you, too. A total of 100 works have arrived from the Munch Museum in Oslo, through which you will discover the different phases and facets of this complex Symbolist artist and forerunner of Impressionism, whom many describe as the painter of pain. But was he really? There is a tendency — and a desire — to pigeonhole artists, to tie them to a movement, a style, to give them a definition. It is certainly simpler to communicate, but it almost never corresponds to the truth. Munch and his works — varied (did you know, for instance, that he was also a photographer, a writer and much more?) — are as complex as he was himself. Shaped by the sorrows he endured and caused, and by the people he encountered, colleagues and otherwise. This exhibition, extremely rich in content across the many panels in every room, allows you to go a little beyond what is most widely known, and to delve instead into style and technique, as well as the personal and professional events that brought him to fame. There is also room for less weighty curiosities that nonetheless help to illuminate who Edvard Munch was: an elegant man who enjoyed being photographed, sometimes even nude, obsessed by a love he had guiltily let slip away, who loved his homeland deeply and depicted it frequently. The exhibition at Palazzo Reale is complete and dense — give yourself time to appreciate it properly. Tickets cost €15.
The photographs of Luigi Ghirri have a unique and recognisable poetic quality. Their muted, unsaturated colours make his images feel almost like watercolours — paintings of many locations across our country. And this exhibition just across the border, in Switzerland, at the Lac in Lugano, is a wonderful opportunity to discover not only his best-known shots but also his lesser-known ones, thanks to a carefully curated selection of around 140 colour photographs — mostly vintage prints from the 1970s and 1980s, drawn primarily from the Ghirri family estate and the collection of the Csac in Parma. The journey you will find yourself taking through the museum's rooms is a truly unusual one. Even when Ghirri's photographs capture maps, atlases or simply the shelves of his own home, you will always feel as though you are "elsewhere" — certainly in another time, but also in places near or far. Particularly lovely is the short video in which his daughter and the exhibition's curator speak about the great photographer, outlining the distinctive traits — including aspects of his personality — that made him a major figure in international photography. Admission to the Lac costs 20 Swiss francs and gives access to all the exhibitions. It is a museum with truly remarkable architecture and views — make the most of your visit.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (born 1908) is one of the most famous photographers in the world. For many he is the father of photojournalism, so much so that he earned the title of "eye of the century". The period covered by this exhibition at Palazzo Roverella in Rovigo spans a wide stretch of his life, from the 1930s through to the 1970s, when he decided to give up photography in favour of his other great passion, painting. It was during this era that he undertook several journeys to Italy at different moments in time, documenting them through photographic reportages of great value — not only artistic but also socio-cultural. From a young age, Cartier-Bresson visited our country and ventured to destinations that were unusual for the times and certainly off the tourist trail: in the early 1950s he travelled through Abruzzo and Lucania, regions that fascinated him above all from a social perspective. It was also the era of the writer and painter Carlo Levi, of his denunciation of the state of southern Italy, where ancient traditions and the first tentative steps towards modernity coexisted alongside widespread poverty and profound social change. The photographs he took in Matera and in little-known villages such as Scanno near L'Aquila became celebrated, and it was partly thanks to Cartier-Bresson's work that our own Giacomelli later decided to immortalise these same areas. The exhibition is extensive, comprising around 200 photographs as well as numerous documents — newspapers, magazines, books, letters — which together provide the perfect baggage for this photographic journey through an Italy that no longer exists. Admission costs 10 euros.
You may already know that in Milan, at Palazzo Reale (running concurrently with the exhibitions discussed here), a major retrospective is planned devoted to Enrico Baj, a Milanese artist of multifaceted and brilliant talent who worked across the most varied forms and materials, leaving an indelible mark through his uniqueness and his messages. To mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, two locations that were fundamental to Baj's work as a ceramicist have also been brought into the celebrations: Savona and Albissola, in Liguria, where the artist first began experimenting with clay as part of the Incontro internazionale della ceramica in 1954. This distributed exhibition presents around 70 works (some of which have never been shown before) across the spaces of the Museo della ceramica in Savona and the MuDA in Albissola (Casa Museo Jorn and Centro Esposizioni). For anyone not yet familiar with this artist, this distributed exhibition is the perfect opportunity to enter Baj's world — he was a painter, a ceramicist, but also an essayist. His relationships with Italian and international poets and writers of the calibre of André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Queneau, Edoardo Sanguineti and Umberto Eco make clear that he was a fully rounded intellectual with a remarkable poetic vision and a deep engagement with social issues. His is the monumental pictorial installation "I funerali dell'anarchico Pinelli" — on show at Palazzo Reale for the centenary — which will soon be on permanent display at Palazzo Citterio in Milan. While we wait for this iconic Baj to remain in Milan for ever, let us seek him out in other forms around the country this autumn. The Museo della ceramica in Savona and Casa Museo Jorn are both places you will not regret visiting: the former, housed in a sublime historic palazzo, has been superbly restored and is now a gem; the latter is a blend of madness, dream and harmony that perhaps mirrors what this clan of artists must have been like in the 1950s. Such beauty!
An unmissable opportunity is the chance to visit an exhibition — in fact two — dedicated to a female painter. She is Berthe Morisot, a French Impressionist born in the mid-nineteenth century who managed, better than most, to emerge in a world that was entirely male-dominated. We are talking about a time and a society that conceived of women solely and