More than one hundred pieces from sixty Italian museums, institutions, and private lenders have made possible Milan: Showcase of Modernity. A journey through Italian art from the first half of the 20th century, on view at the Gravina Museum of Fine Arts Mubag in Alicante until May 4, 2025. (Source: Mubag)
The exhibition, inaugurated this Thursday with the presence of Teodora Danisi, the cultural attaché of the Italian Embassy in Spain, brings together masterpieces of Italian painting from the first four decades of the last century, complemented by audiovisual pieces, documents, and period dresses that reveal the splendor of Milan as a metropolis and its renewing influence on the arts. (Source: Mubag)
The Milan exhibition, Milán: Showcase of Modernity, which began to take shape almost two years ago, is the result of coordinated work over the past year between Mubag staff and the three Italian curators of the show: Danka Giacon, who attended the opening, along with Nicoletta Colombo and Serena Redaelli. The Alicante museum was also visited by the Honorary Consul of Italy in Alicante, Danilo Angelini, and the provincial deputy for Culture, Juan de Dios Navarro. (Source: Mubag)
The director of Mubag, Jorge Soler, emphasized that for this show, for the first time the museum benefited from a nominative subsidy from the Conselleria de Cultura, amounting to 200,000 euros, to mount and produce the exhibition. (Source: Mubag)
The director noted that with this initiative Mubag resumes its affinity with Italian art, spanning from the early 20th century to the 1940s, after stating that Milan was a laboratory of ideas set in a climate of progress fostered by social changes that fed modern art. He added that the art corpus arriving at Mubag occupies the museum’s second floor, distributed across eight rooms arranged chronologically and enriched with historical material that helps visitors understand its interaction with other Italian realities and contextualizes the dynamics that defined that pivotal era. (Source: Mubag)
Teodora Danisi expressed solidarity with those affected by DANA, noting that in this show Milan becomes a playground for artistic experimentation, revealing a strong, elegant, and vibrant character that projected the country toward modernity in an industrialized world eager for renewal. Curator Giacon explained that the journey through the most significant movements, together with documents and period garments, offers a comprehensive panorama of Italian society and the art of the last century, which helped Milan become an international reference in both art and industrial production. (Source: Mubag)
The Exhibition Proposal
The new proposal includes 37 paintings, four period photographs and a historical video, 48 documents and publications, nine dresses and textiles, among other pieces. Juan de Dios Navarro noted that the museum hosts works by 41 artists such as Modigliani and Chirico in one of the most important exhibitions resulting from institutional collaboration, with lenders including Milan’s Museo del Novecento and the Museo de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo de Trento, among others. (Source: Mubag)
The exhibition is organized into six sections, each corresponding to a different artistic movement. It begins with Milan and the Exposition Universelle of 1906 and delves into late 19th and early 20th‑century Divisionist painting, featuring artists such as Angelo Morbelli, Carlo Fornara, and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo; followed by the transition from Divisionism to Futurism and the Futurist works that influenced European culture, with contributions from Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Fillia, and Bruno Munari. (Source: Mubag)
Modigliani and the School of Paris
The Return to Order and the Italian Novecento emerge after World War I, moving away from the early vanguards and bringing together artists such as Anselmo Bucci, Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati, and Gian Emilio Malerba, drawing closer to Modigliani and the Italians in Paris. The show highlights foreign influences from Italians born in Paris in 1928, such as Giorgio de Chirico, Massimo Campigli, Paresce, Savinio, Severini, and Mario Tozzi, who followed the first phase of the École de Paris represented by Modigliani, whose 1917 Head of a Woman is on view, a genius long recognized in France before Italy, who died in 1920 at 35 years old. (Source: Mubag)
In the final section, Italian historical abstraction and the Corrente years converge, with figures like Mauro Reggiani, Luigi Veronesi, Lucio Fontana, and Manlio Rho leading these movements, defined by a search for a rational order grounded in mathematics, alongside Corrente, a neo-romantic tendency born from a magazine published just before World War II. Painters such as Renato Guttuso, Giuseppe Migneco, Bruno Cassinari, and Aligi Sassu are featured, and Milan bears the scars of the 1943 bombings, which are documented in a closing video. (Source: Mubag)