CASORATI, the exhibition in Milan, Palazzo Reale
15 February to 29 June 2025
Milan, 4 December 2024. The City of Milan and Marsilio Arte present one of the largest and most comprehensive retrospectives devoted to the extraordinary Italian artist Felice Casorati (Novara, 1883 – Turin, 1963), who returns to Milan at Palazzo Reale from 15 February to 29 June 2025, 36 years after the last exhibition about him in 1989. Promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Culture and produced by Palazzo Reale and Marsilio Arte in collaboration with the Casorati Archive, the exhibition is curated by Giorgina Bertolino, Fernando Mazzocca and Francesco Poli, among the leading scholars of Casorati’s work.
The historical bond between the artist and the city of Milan is one of the themes of the exhibition and the catalogue published by Marsilio Arte. Throughout his long career, Casorati attributed a strategic function to Milan, the first city in Italy to endow itself with a modern art system and market, considering its exhibitions in the 1920s a strategic space for a direct confrontation with the latest artistic research.
Casorati at Palazzo Reale proposes an overall rereading of the artist’s work, retracing the different seasons of his production in chronological order through fourteen rooms, from the beginnings in the early twentieth century to the 1950s. More than a hundred works are presented for the occasion, including paintings on canvas and panel, sculptures, graphic works from the Symbolist period, and sketches for stage sets of works realised for the Teatro alla Scala. All are major works and of the highest quality, selected for their exemplary exhibition history. The loans come from prestigious private collections and from important public collections, including in particular the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, which houses the most important and richest museum collection of Casorati’s work, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the Mart – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Genoa, and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti in Verona. Pivotal to the project is the close collaboration with the Casorati Archive, which has provided scientific support and the consultation and sharing of historical documentary material.
As the curators observe, «the retrospective was conceived to transport visitors into Casorati’s poetic universe, inviting them to immerse themselves in his spaces (the interiors and the studio, the conceptual theatre of his entire poetics), leading the to the midst of the pensive and melancholic figures, reflective emblems of a participatory humanity and a profound existential philosophy. The rooms of the Palazzo Reale provide the perfect courtly context for reconstructing the silent dimension emanating from the works themselves, made up of pauses, counterpoints and voids».
![exhibition Casorati Milan Palazzo Reale Raja [1924-1925], tempera su tavola, 120 x 100 cm. Venezia, collezione privata. Crediti per la foto: Matteo De Fina](https://www.classicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Felice-Casorati_Raja_Ph-Matteo-De-Fina-834x1024.jpeg)
The layout of the exhibition follows the entire chronology of Felice Casorati’s career, documenting the alternation of sources of inspiration and styles, from Verism to Symbolism, from Neoclassicism to Magic Realism, from the most expressionist phase oriented by Picasso’s deformations to the return to Syntheticism and à plat works characteristic of the production of his later years.
The exhibition opens with early works characterised by a pronounced realism, including the famous Ritratto della sorella Elvira (Portrait of his sister Elvira) from 1907 (private collection) and Le ereditiere (The Heiresses) of 1910 loaned from the Mart in Rovereto. An important focus is devoted to the years spent in Verona, where the artist moved with his family in 1911. It was in this city that his Symbolist and Secessionist season began, fuelled by the comparison with nearby Venice, where Casorati frequented Ca’ Pesaro, staged his first solo exhibition in 1913 and met Gino Rossi, Arturo Martini and Teodoro Wolf Ferrari.
The exhibition presents some of the artist’s greatest masterpieces, including the cycle of Grandi tempere (1918-1920), and records the evolution of style and language after his definitive move to Turin, in the wake of the tragic death of his father. Here, in 1919, Felice Casorati settled in the house-studio where he would live for the rest of his life. For the first time since 1964, three important paintings, characterised by a bare, desolate spatial dimension and a metaphysical sense of disquieting loneliness, are brought together in a virtual triptych: Una Donna (or l’Attesa) – A Woman (or The Wait) – 1918-19, private collection, Un uomo (or Uomo delle botti) – A Man (or The Barrels Man) – 1919-20 and Bambina (or Ragazza con scodella) – Young Girl (or Girl with Bowl) – 1919, from the collection of the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino. The section is completed by the imposing and majestic Colazione (Breakfast, Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. Cerruti Collection), which portrays a family of only women, perhaps orphans or war widows, summarising Casorati’s emotional and psychological state, in tune with the sense of mourning that pervades the early post-war years.
The twenties were opened by the masterpieces La donna e l’armatura (Woman and Armour) of 1921 (GAM Turin) and Silvana Cenni of 1922 (private collection), a metaphysical icon inspired by classical fifteenth-century refinement and Piero della Francesca’s altarpieces in particular.
Casorati’s collaboration with Riccardo Gualino, collector, patron and entrepreneur, for whom the artist painted family portraits and designed, together with architect Alberto Sartoris, the small private theatre in their Turin residence, dates back to this period. The association is illustrated in the exhibition by the three Gualino portraits, the portrait of Alfredo Casella (private collection), composer and pianist, director of many concerts in the little theatre in Turin, and the dancers Raja and Bella Markman, protagonists with Cesarina Gualino, of the free dance performances under the Casorati friezes of the little theatre, documented by the bas-reliefs Donna con arco, L’incontro con la musica, Donna seduta con scodella (Woman with bow, The encounter with music, Seated woman with bowl), now in a private collection.
In 1924 Casorati participated in La Biennale di Venezia, which constituted an important moment of recognition and celebrity; the exhibition dedicates an entire room to this episode, with five of the works exhibited on that occasion: Meriggio of 1923 (Museo Revoltella, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Trieste), Natura morta con manichini (Still life with mannequins) of 1924 (Museo Novecento, Milan), Ritratto di Hena Rigotti (Portrait of Hena Rigotti, GAM Turin), Duplice ritratto (Double portrait, private collection) and Concerto (Concert) of 1924 (RAI, Direzione Generale, Turin and Rome). In the mid-1920s, Casorati developed the theme of Conversazioni, a virtual cycle inaugurated by the celebrated and still intriguing Conversazione platonica (Platonic Conversation) of 1925 (private collection). The painting, in which a man wearing a black hat sits next to a reclining and sensual female nude (the male sitter is the architect and friend Alberto Sartoris), was the protagonist of a long exhibition tour with its debut at the First Exhibition of the Italian Novecento in Milan in 1926, followed by intervals in Dresden (1926), Geneva, Zurich and Pittsburgh (1927), New York (1928) and the Barcelona Expo (1929), where it was awarded a gold medal.
At the exhibition, after many years hidden from public view, it will be possible to admire the extraordinary painting Annunciazione (Annunciation) of 1927, from a private collection. Chosen by the artist for the 1927 exhibitions of Italian art at the Musée Rath in Geneva and then at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, it now goes on public display once again. In the rarefied and still atmosphere of an interior, Casorati constructs an intimate scene in which the divine transpires from the specularity and symmetries through the irreconcilability of opposites: the natural light and the complex and enigmatic geometry of space. Included for the first time in an anthological exhibition, the painting marks an essential episode within the arc of Casorati’s career.

Towards the end of the decade, Casorati’s art was marked by a turning point leading towards an anti-classical approach, as witnessed in the exhibition by a series of marvellous still lifes. His painting opened up to landscape, tackled in the dialogue between interior and exterior in the poetic Daphne a Pavarolo (Daphne at Pavarolo) of 1934 (GAM Turin). This is followed by the cycle of paintings of young girls from the 1930s and 1940s, including Donne in barca (Women in a Boat) of 1933 (Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi, Piacenza) and Le sorelle Pontorno (The Pontorno Sisters) of 1937 (Unicredit ArtCollection), both showing a woman breastfeeding immersed in silent and intimate setting.
![Le sorelle Pontorno, [1937], olio su tela, 162 x 129 cm. UniCredit Art Collection. Crediti per la foto: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano](https://www.classicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Felice-Casorati_Le-sorelle-Pontorno_Ph-Sebastiano-Pellion-di-Persano-742x1024.jpeg)
The last years are documented by still lifes, in which the old theme of eggs returns (the evidence of that ‘Numerus, Mensura, Pondus’ which is the heraldic motto of Casorati’s art), along with that of the helmet crest – with Natura morta con l’elmo (Still Life with Helmet, 1947, GAM Turin), Uova e limoni (Eggs and Lemons, 1950, GAM Turin), Uova su fondo rosso (Eggs on a Red Background, 1953, private collection) – and a series of new subjects such as Eclissi di luna (Eclipse of the Moon, 1949, private collection) and Paralleli (Parallels, 1949, Regione Autonoma Valle d’Aosta Collection).
Always a music lover, Felice Casorati was not only an exceptional painter and a passionate pianist but also a set designer, working for Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Rome Opera House and La Scala in Milan between the 1930s and the 1950s. From the historical
archives of La Scala, the exhibition displays many of his sketches made for operas such as Le Baccanti and Fidelio, or for ballets to music by Petrassi or de Falla: a nucleus that, at the end of the exhibition, will make it possible to get to know this side of the activity of the talented and multifaceted artist.
The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive catalogue published by Marsilio Arte with essays by the curators.
![Tiro al bersaglio (o Tiro a segno) [1919], tempera su tela, 130 x 120 cm. Torino, collezione privata. Crediti per la foto: Pino Dell'Aquila](https://www.classicult.it/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Felice-Casorati_Tiro-al-bersaglio_ph.Pino-DellAquila-948x1024.jpeg)
Giorgina Bertolino. After gaining a degree at the University of Turin, she developed her main areas of study in the field of twentieth-century art history. She is the author of the general catalogues of Felice Casorati (with F. Poli; 1997, 2004), Pinot Gallizio (edited by M.T. Roberto) and Nella Marchesini (2015). She has curated I mondi di Riccardo Gualino (with A. Bava; Turin, Musei Reali, 2019); Dalle bombe al museo 1942-1959 (with R. Passoni; Turin, GAM, 2016); Felice Casorati. Collezioni e mostre tra Europa e Americhe (Alba, Fondazione Ferrero, 2014).
Fernando Mazzocca. After graduating from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, he taught at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and the Università Statale in Milan. One of the leading specialists of the Neoclassical, nineteenth and early twentieth century, he has published numerous volumes and realised major exhibitions on movements and of a monographic nature held at leading Italian exhibition venues since 1978.
Francesco Poli. A graduate in philosophy from the University of Turin, he is an art historian and critic. He has taught History of Contemporary Art at the Brera Academy and Université Paris 8. He has published numerous essays on modern and contemporary art including: La Metafisica; Minimalismo, Arte Povera, Arte Concettuale; Il sistema dell’arte contemporanea; Arte moderna. Dal postimpressionismo all’informale; Arte contemporanea. Le ricerche internazionali dalla fine degli anni’50 ad oggi; La Scultura del Novecento; Mettere in scena l’arte contemporanea (with F. Bernardelli); Il pittore solitario. Seurat e la Parigi moderna. L’ironia è una cosa seria. Strategie dell’arte d’avanguardia e contemporanea. He writes for “La Stampa” and specialised magazines. He has also curated numerous exhibitions in museums, public and private spaces.
Press release from the Municipality of Milan and Marsilio Arte.