It seems, without perhaps being one of the largest and most complete retrospective dedicated to Felice Casorati (Novara, 1883 – Turin, 1963), an extraordinary Italian artist who returns to Milan at the Royal Palace until 29 June 2025, 35 years after the last 1990 exhibition.
Promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Cultura and produced by Palazzo Reale and Marsilio Arte in collaboration with the Casorati Archive. The historical link between the artist and the city of Milan is one of the themes of the exhibition and the catalog published by Marsilio Arte. During his long career, Casorati has attributed a strategic function in Milan, the first city in Italy to equip itself with a modern system and art market, recognizing the strategic space for a direct comparison with the most updated artistic research at its reviews of the 1920s.
Casorati At Palazzo Reale proposes an overall rereading of the artist’s work, retracing in chronological order through 14 the different seasons of his production, from the beginning in the early twentieth century to the 1950s. Over one hundred works presented for the occasion, including paintings on canvas and table, sculptures, graphic works of the symbolist season, sketches for scenography of works created for the Teatro alla Scala, all of absolute importance and refined quality, selected for their exemplary exhibition history. The loans come from prestigious private collections and from important public collections, including the Gam – Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Turin, where the most important and rich museum collection of works by Casorati, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the International Gallery of Modern Art Ca ‘Pesaro of Venice, the Museum of the twentieth century of Milan, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, is preserved Trento and Rovereto, the Modern Art Gallery of Genoa, the Modern Art Gallery Achille Forti in Verona. The card of the project is the close collaboration with the Casorati Archive, which has ensured the scientific support and consultation and sharing of historical documentary materials.
As the curators observe, “the retrospective has been designed to transport visitors within the poetic universe of Casorati, inviting them to immerse yourself in its environments (the interiors and the study, conceptual theater of its entire poetic), leading them among the thoughtful and melancholy figures, reflective emblems of a participating humanity and a profound existential philosophy. The rooms of Palazzo Reale constitute the perfect court context to reconstruct the silent dimension, made of pauses, counterpoints and empty, issued by the works themselves “. The narrative follows the entire chronology of the art of Felice Casorati, documenting the alternation of the sources of inspiration and styles, from verism to symbolism, from neoclassicism to magical realism, from the most expressionist phase oriented by Picassian deformations until the return to syntheticism and to the à Plat drafting, characteristics of the production of the end of the career. 
The path opens with the first works characterized by a strong realism, including the famous Portrait of his sister Elvira of 1907 (private collection) or the heir of the Mart of Rovereto of 1910. An important focus is dedicated to the years spent in Verona, where the artist moved with his family in 1911. In this city he began his symbolist and secessionist season, fueled by the comparison with nearby Venice, where Casorati attends Ca ‘Pesaro, set up his first personal exhibition in 1913 and meets Gino Rossi, Arturo Martini, Teodoro Wolf Ferrari.
The exhibition proposes some of the major masterpieces of the author with the cycle of great tempera and records the evolution of style and language after the definitive transfer to Turin, following the tragic death of the father. Here, in 1919, Felice Casorati settled in the house-Studio where he will live throughout his life. For the first time since 1964, three important paintings characterized by a naked and desolate spatial dimension and a metaphysical sense of disturbing loneliness have been approached in an ideal triptych: a woman (or the wait, 1918-19, private collection), a man (or man of the barrels, 1919-20) and girl (or girl with bowl, 1919), both from the Gam collection of modern and contemporary art gallery of art Turin. The section is completed by the imposing and majestic breakfast (Rivoli Castle – Museum of Contemporary Art. Cerruti Collection), which portrays a family of women, perhaps orphans or widows of war, to summarize the emotional state e 
Psychological of Casorati, intoned to the sense of mourning that pervades the early post -war years.
The masterpieces the woman and the armor of 1921 (Gam Turin) and Silvana Notes of 1922 (private collection), metaphysical icon inspired by the classical measuring measures and the altarpiece of Piero della Francesca, open the masterpieces. The collaboration of Casorati with Riccardo Gualino, collector, patron and entrepreneur dates back to this period, for which the artist paints the family portraits and designs, together with the architect Alberto Sartoris, the small private theater in their Turin residence. The partnership is reconstructed on display by the three portraits Gualino, by the portrait of Alfredo Casella (private collection), composer and pianist, director of many concerts in the Turin theater, and of the dancers Raja and Bella Markman, protagonists with Cesarina Gualino, of the free dance performances under the Casoratian Fregi del Teatrino, documented by the bas -reliefs woman with arch, the meeting with the music, with bowl (private collection).
In 1924 Casorati participated in the Venice Biennale, an important moment of recognition and celebrity, in which the exhibition dedicates an entire room with
Five of the works exhibited on that occasion: Meriggio of 1923 (Revoltella Museum, Gallery of Modern Art, Trieste), Dead Nature with Mannequins of 1924 (Museo Novecento, Milan), portrait of Hena Rigotti (Gam Turin) and dual portrait (private collection). Starting from the mid -1920s, Casorati develops the theme of conversations, an ideal cycle inaugurated by the famous and still intriguing Platonic conversation of 1925 (private collection). The painting, in which next to a sensual female naked female, sits a man with a black hat (he is the architect and friend Alberto Sartoris), was the protagonist of a long exhibition tour with the debut at the first Italian twentieth century exhibition in Milan in 1926 and stages in Dresden (1926), in Geneva, Zurich and Pittsburgh (1927), in New York (1928) Barcelona (1929), where he was awarded with a gold medal. On display it can be admired after many years the extraordinary painting Annunciation of 1927, coming from a private collection: chosen by the artist for the Italian art exhibitions of 1927 at the Musée Rath in Geneva and then to the Kunsthaus in Zurich, he returns today visible to the general public. In the rarefied and suspended atmosphere of an interior, Casorati builds an intimate scene in which the divine transpires from specularity and symmetries through the irreconcilability of the opposites: the very natural light and the complex and enigmatic geometry of space. Reinsted for the first time in an anthological, the painting marks an essential episode within the arch of the Casoratian itinerary.
At the end of the decade, Casorati’s art is marked by an anti -lassical turning point, testified on display by the compositions of a series of wonderful death. The painting opens to the landscape, approached in the dialogue between interior and outside in the poetics Daphne in Pavarolo of 1934 (Gam Turin). The cycle of paintings by girls from the 1930s and 1940s was now born, including women by boat from 1933 (Modern Art Gallery Ricci Oddi, Piacenza) and the Pontorno sisters of 1937 (Unicredit ArtCollection), both characterized by a breastfeeding woman, immersed in suspended and intimate atmospheres.
The last few years are documented by death, in which the ancient theme of the eggs returns (teaches of that “numerus, mensura, pondus” which is the heraldic motto of Casoratian art) and Cimiero – with a dead nature with the helmet (1947, Gam Turin), eggs and lemons (1950, Gam Turin) eggs on the red background (1953, private collection) – and new subjects as the eclipses of the Moon (1949, 1949, Private collection) and parallel (1949, Valle d’Aosta Autonomous Region Collection). Always passionate about music, Felice Casorati was not only an exceptional painter and a passionate pianist but also scenographer, at work, between the 1930s and fifties, for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the work of Rome and the Scala of Milan. Precisely from the historical archives of the staircase there are numerous of his sketches, made for works such as the pods and Fidelio, or for ballets on music by Petrassi or De Falla: a nucleus that, at the end of the exhibition, will also allow you to know this side of the activity of a rigorous and multifaceted artist. The exhibition is accompanied by a large catalog published by Marsilio Arte with the essays of the curators. The exhibition is promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Cultura and produced by Palazzo Reale and Marsilio Arte in collaboration with the Casorati Archive. Sponsor Bper Banca; Atm technical partner, with the support of Coop Lombardia.
Carlo Franza