ESSEN.- The exhibition “Uncannily Real: Italian Painting of the 1920s” presents more than 80 paintings from Realismo Magico. This artistic movement emerged in Italy in the wake of the First World War, parallel to Neue Sachlichkeit in Germany. Outstanding works by key protagonists such as Felice Casorati, Antonio Donghi and Ubaldo Oppi are featured alongside influential paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. This represents the first comprehensive presentation of these works in Germany, allowing visitors to rediscover this strand of Modernism.

After the experiences of the First World War, in Europe and beyond, many artists returned to a realistic form of representation, definitively abandoning Expressionism. Picking up on the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà and the rappel à l’ordre (call for a return to order) issued by Parisian Neo-Classicism, the artists cause time to stand still in their paintings. They imbue their realistic depictions with dream-like, uncanny, at times disturbing elements. The paintings depict their subject matter clearly and precisely, while retaining a cryptic quality to their atmospheres and themes. The result is the production of evocative works of outstanding painterly quality, often in dazzling colours. The catalyst for these developments was an interrogation of Quattrocento painting, such as Piero della Francesca or Masaccio, whose detailed, realistic depictions and perspectival drawings provided them with inspiration.

The exhibition organises the presentation of the paintings into thematic rooms. The first room juxtaposes the architectural images of Carrà and de Chirico with those of Ubaldo Oppi and the significantly later painting La città deserta by Carlo Sbisà. There is a focus on portraits of women, which are all marked at once by a sense of pride and a mysterious beauty. This is as true of Casorati’s “Cynthia” as it is of Donghi’s “Donna al Caffè”. Intimate and familiar, domestic scenes are also a favoured subject of Realismo magico. They depict children who look like miniature adults, indeed in Felice Casorati’s “The Schoolchildren”, they almost seem to resemble revenants. In addition to this, there are table scenes conveying atmospheres of sociality, but even more so, of alienation and loneliness. Another exhibition room is dedicated to masquerades. Time and again, the artists address the theme of painterly representation, or more precisely, of revelation and concealment, of the play of illusion, choosing harlequins, clowns and magicians as motifs. The recurring depictions of drapery and textiles suggest a similar line. In addition to nudes that have been drained of virtually all affection, replacing it with a sense of brutality and isolation – as, for example, in the contorted body of Cagnaccio di San Pietro’s spectacular painting “Primo denaro” – still lifes are a decisive genre for Realismo Magico.

These key genres are intimately related to the content of the images, and are also always reflective of the zeitgeist in Italy in the aftermath of the First World War in the 1920s and 1930s.

The nine thematic groupings illustrate that Realismo magico in no way refers to a closed, self-contained group of artists. Nevertheless, for all the diversity of their individual approaches, they are united by a common mood. The concept of “Magischer Realismus”, coined by the art historian Franz Roh in 1925, describes a puzzling atmosphere in which things are held in abeyance: “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.”

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 these paintings, whose ambiguities all too often trigger uneasiness in the viewer, received relatively little attention in recent decades. The exhibition is accompanied by a historical overview of Italy, its artistic groupings and approaches, and by Italian posters from the era and by a film programme chosen by film expert Olaf Möller.

Peter Gorschlüter: “I’m so pleased that this exhibition provides a glimpse into this era that for so long remained in the shadows of art historical research, enabling a new, comprehensive perspective on the works, which have been gathered together from numerous institutional and private collections. In this respect, the academic symposium that will accompany the exhibition is an important component of our approach to considering this artistic style in a more comprehensive fashion.”