Villa Bertelli, Forte dei Marmi
PERMANENT COLLECTION
From the room dedicated to the works of Arturo Dazzi donated by his heirs to the Municipality of Forte dei Marmi and currently managed by the Villa Bertelli Foundation, the route winds through the spaces that host sculptures and paintings by the masters of “Novecento” and the authors of the post-war period, the result of loans from private collections, to flow into the section dedicated to photographic testimonies of the territory.
Room 1
Forte dei Marmi hides a history that is now forgotten. A history of relationships between artists and the territory, starting with Michelangelo, fascinated by Monte Altissimo. It is precisely the place that favored the attraction of artists, as Barbizon, Deauville and Trouville had been for the Impressionists, the midi for Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne.
In Forte dei Marmi, the wide expanses of beaches and the vast horizon of the sea on one side, the profile of the mountains and the lush vegetation on the other, inspire artists towards a new study of nature.
A landscape that remained protected for centuries because it was initially inhospitable, without easily passable roads, but at the same time a place of work and an important economic hub in Italy for the extraction of stone.
The room tells the story of the landscape, urban and social transformations of the territory, to understand the cultural history of the place in the context of reference.
A section is dedicated to the beginning of the story to the birth of the cultural cenacle il Quarto Platano in the period between the two wars, when Forte dei Marmi became a point of reference for artists and intellectuals on holiday who met in their homes and in the Cafés, true centers of cultural aggregation.
Marina (houses on the shore), Carlo Carrà
Study of a bull, Francesco Messina
Room 2
Arturo Dazzi was born in Carrara on July 31, 1881. Marble was an immediate part of his life: a rough-hewer in his father’s workshop, from 1892 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara where he completed his studies in 1899.
He immediately demonstrated his propensity for sculpture by winning (1901-1905) two artistic “pensioners”, which granted him a stay in Rome.
In the early 1900s, riding the wave of enthusiasm of a fervent Rome, he took part in competitions, worked in Genoa and Livorno and exhibited at the International Biennials in Venice (1926-1928).
In 1926 he felt the call of his native land and left Rome; in his home in Vittoria Apuana he met friends, critics and artists.
In 1929 he was appointed professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara.
At the Rome Quadrennial of 1945 he surprised critics with his pictorial production, previously unpublished.
His decisive, heroic, “new” classicist sculptural style, which exalts work and man, was particularly appreciated during the fascist regime: in 1937 he was appointed Academician of Italy.
In 1939, at the Universal Exhibition in New York, he created the central work of the Italian pavilion.
The fall of the Regime led to the closure of many of the construction sites on which Dazzi worked, including that of the Stele Marconiana, which the artist cared most about.
Because of his adherence to fascist ideals, he was exiled to Maremma until 1947, when he returned to Forte dei Marmi. The following years were difficult: no one was interested in his projects anymore and Dazzi fell into an ideological and creative crisis.
In 1954 he resumed work on the Stele Marconiana; the solemn inauguration (December 11, 1949) decreed his rehabilitation among Italian artists.
During the Sixties he followed various commissions until his death (October 15, 1966).
In 1986 his wife Andreina Vannoni donated the works of the Dazzi studio to the Municipality of Forte dei Marmi, which, preserved in the Villa Bertelli warehouse, are today exhibited in an exhibition dedicated to the artist.
Head and bust of Saint Francis, Arturo Dazzi
Drawings Alfredo Catarsini, Alfredo Catarsini
Room 3
The room dedicated to the historical masters collects a selection of works by artists who frequented Versilia, authors who belonged to the generation of the protagonists of the Italian twentieth century, both in its Lombard declination represented by Carlo Carrà, Achille Funi, Raffaele de Grada, Arturo Tosi, and in the Tuscan area variant, characterized by a less programmatic poetics as it is more inclined to bring out the free feeling of nature: it is this modern pictorialism that is found in the works of Felice Carena, Ardengo Soffici, Ottone Rosai, Mario Marcucci, while a separate discussion is reserved for the expressionist sketching of the psychological “masks” of Lorenzo Viani.
The works exhibited here denote a common tendency towards lyricism and executive ease, stimulated by the nature of Forte dei Marmi and the surrounding places, at the time still uncontaminated and therefore able to inspire artists to a greater release from schematic and formal compositional limitations. Linked to a mediating landscape between the 19th and 20th centuries is Umberto Vittorini, Tuscan by birth and Milanese by adoption.
Alongside the evocative works on the theme of landscape, the room hosts pictorial essays by the two metaphysical brothers Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio, the first represented by a baroque horse running in the landscape and the second by a portrait composed in the golden years of the Italiens de Paris. The sculptor Francesco Messina, an author who arrived on the shores of Marina di Pietrasanta since the early twenties, is present with a bronze of classical-Mediterranean inspiration and with two drawings, while Marino Marini is represented by a characteristic, simplified bronze portrait, intended to capture the psychology of the character portrayed.
Young woman with necklace, Achille Funi
Landscape with houses, Ottone Rosai
Sala 4
Portrait, Mario Marcucci
Enrico Pea, Lorenzo Viani
Room 5
The room dedicated to the works of authors who were mostly active in the post-war period, brings together artists born between the last years of the 19th century and the first thirty-five of the 20th.
Massimo Campigli offers the visitor yet another glorification of women in the guise of Etruscan idols, totemic and timeless. The ironic and satirical expressionism of Mino Maccari is highlighted here by two subtly polemical paintings. Giuseppe Migneco, master of social realism, is presented with two canvases denouncing the discomfort and solitude of modern life.
The work of Renato Guttuso qualifies the ennoblement of a plant, a humble object of domestic life, as the protagonist of the work of art. Two realistic pencils by the Florentine painter and illustrator Guido Borgianni depict the people of Forte dei Marmi.
Ernesto Treccani is present with a theme of lyrical, metamorphic naturalism and a painted majolica sculpture, while the room hosts a bronze horse and a canvas ablaze with color by Bruno Cassinari. A rare and dreamy oil painting on the theme of the cabins of the Forte was found by the poet Eugenio Montale.
Thickenings of material, contrasts of color, a restless mixture of organic and inorganic are experimented in the work of Carlo Mattioli. Terracottas and a bronze by the sculptor Ugo Guidi, a student and assistant of Arturo Dazzi, record his love for the female figure.
Among the foreign artists, the American Robert Carroll, an investigator of plant and animal life, present with an original drawing, closes the post-war exhibition, but not before having left room for the all-Italian quality of the geometric-surreal abstraction of Gianni Dova.
Fisherman, Giuseppe Migneco
Head, Gianni Dova
Sala Ernesto Treccani
What Remains, Sigfrido Bartolini
Lady Godiva, Mino Maccari
