Loaning Artworks: When Beauty and Emotion Are Shared. Anselmo Bucci’s I Bibliofili at MART Trento and Rovereto

A painting from Generali Heritage is among the centrepieces of the first significant retrospective dedicated to Anselmo Bucci at Trento and Rovereto’s MART Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition features pieces from respected private and public collections, including Milan’s Museo del Novecento, Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Central Museum for the Italian Risorgimento, the Quadreria Cesarini museum and gallery in Fossombrone and Monza’s Musei Civici. The retrospective would not have been complete without I Bibliofili (1926) [“Bibliophiles”], among the most important works of 20th century art in Generali’s art collection, located at the company’s historic headquarters in Trieste’s Palazzo Geiringer.

The exhibition Anselmo Bucci (1887 – 1955). Il tempo del Novecento tra Italia e Europa, curated by Beatrice Avanzi and Luca Baroni, opens on March 28 and is set to feature more than 150 of the Fossombrone-born artist’s works (many of them going on display for the first time), including paintings, engravings, drawings and photographs.

A highly versatile artist, equally talented at painting, engraving, drawing and writing, Bucci holds a unique position in the landscape of Italian interwar art: a prominent figure in the cultural milieus of Paris (the epicentre of avant-garde art at the time), where he befriended famed artists including Modigliani, Picasso and Severini, and Milan, who nonetheless always maintained an unwavering intellectual autonomy. This is clear in his ambiguous relationship with the Italian Novecento movement, which he founded in 1922 alongside Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Leonardo Dudreville, Emilio Malerba, Pietro Marussig and Ubaldo Oppi, even giving it its name, only to later distance himself from it.

It was at the same time, in 1922, that Bucci was commissioned by Nathan Rogers to work on the large canvas artwork that would become I Bibliofili.

The inscription on the reverse side of the canvas opens a fascinating and noteworthy, although little-known, chapter in the history of art. The commissioner of the painting, Romeo Nathan Rogers (1878-1944), was an English insurance agent working for Generali and living in Trieste, where, in 1905, he befriended James Joyce. He was also the father of the renowned architect, Ernesto Nathan Rogers who would later continue the excellent relationship with the artist.

“Bucci of the Novecento”, as he referred to himself in the exhibition at the Galleria Pesaro in April 1923, was not short of unconventional ideas, so much so that in I Bibliofili Elena Pontiggia noted the “grotesquely square forms”.

There is a visible irony in the composition, in the contrast between the monumental figures of the two experts and the books that appear disproportionate in their hands, and their physical forms that struggle to find a comfortable position, with the shelves at their back. Bucci further embellishes the image with details such as the pipe, which casts a shadow on the white scarf of the man on the right, and the lighting effect which, in true Novecento style, appears completely natural but in an enclosed space.

Over the years, the artist maintained a uniquely original style, moving between Post-Impressionism, Futurism and classicism, with a focus on human figures and urban life, without ever fully committing to any one school.

Long omitted from the discourse surrounding important names in Italian art in the first half of the previous century, Anselmo Bucci’s corpus is now finally being re-examined in its unmistakably European historical and cultural context. The retrospective highlights the central role of the artist in the transition from the figurative tradition of the 19th century to the experiments of the one that followed, offering critics and public alike a glimpse at one of the most complex, cultured and distinctive figures of the 20th century.