Sironi again, in an exhibition with a clear anthological intent, which traces his long, for some controversial, artistic career. From the small oil painting, dated 1900, to works of a painful maturity, which is reflected in a broken, but equally fascinating style. Yet, there is much more in this exhibition, a documentary need for clarity, the will for a detailed and, as far as possible, objective analysis. A sort of soul inventory, through the works of great Italian collectors who loved Sironi’s powerful innovation (in the domestic format, as well as in public works), but also the silent, conscious volume, which makes the artist so distant, in results, from the Futurist spark of his origins, so deaf even to the calls of Fascist propaganda, of which he is often considered the standard-bearer.

Even his absolute adherence to Fascism reveals itself, in artistic rendering, as a partial misunderstanding: Sironi was interested in creating social art, art that everyone could understand and appreciate as a sign of an Italy that asserts itself, that recovers its credibility. In fact, his friend Arturo Martini, in 1944, declared that Sironi “believed he was a Fascist, but instead he was of Bolshevik and almost abysmal soul.” Through the examples offered to the public of a multifaceted, but always coherent personality, the Abano exhibition accompanies us in the history of a sentimental and social impetus that believes to find structure by adhering to an ideology. Instead, in the paintings as well as in the preparatory cartoons for the mural decoration Venice, Italy, and Studies that Sironi created for the Great Hall of Ca’ Foscari between 1935 and 1936, in the deserted cities of a solid and desperate solitude (which poorly fit the myth of regime Italy), as well as in the post-war compositions what emerges — inescapable — is Sironi’s lyricism.

A desperate poetry that the hierarchs could not fully appreciate, but which still well represents our present. A thin line that, from Laurana reaches Arturo Martini and Sironi: in his massive and ecstatic women who resonate of Etruria, more shaped than described; in the suspended atmospheres that ferry Sarfatti’s Novecento to the extreme results of Guido’s magical realism, above all; in the choice of an extreme idiom, in syntactic-formal blocks, reminiscent of Licata.

The lyrical intention, as of one who has crossed hell and seen every ideal collapse, is all in the work Two Figures (1955) that the curators of the exhibition have chosen as the guiding image: an oil on canvas from the artist’s last period, finally free to express distances.

Cover: Mario Sironi, Donna che si pettina, 1930 circa, collezione privata © SIAE 2022