The Museo Novecento is celebrating its 10th anniversary with the exhibition “Ritorni. From Modigliani to Morandi.” This major show focuses on the Alberto Della Ragione collection, one of the museum’s most valuable assets. Curated by Sergio Risaliti, Eva Francioli, and Chiara Toti, it will be on display until September 15, 2024, in the former Leopoldine rooms on the museum’s second floor.

The exhibition, which will take place in the adjacent rooms usually housing the Permanent Collection, will shed new light on the refined choices of Alberto Della Ragione and reconstruct the complex events leading to the formation of one of the most important private collections of the 20th century. It will feature, among other pieces, masterpieces not seen in Italy since the last century.

Italian Contemporary Masters

The exhibition will include works by some of the greatest Italian masters of the 20th century, currently held in prestigious public and private collections, both Italian and foreign.

Alongside significant metaphysical compositions by Giorgio Morandi and Carlo Carrà, and celebrated works by artists supported both personally and financially by Della Ragione, such as Renato Guttuso and Renato Birolli, the show will prominently feature Amedeo Modigliani’s famous “Self-Portrait,” the only one in existence, a true icon behind which lies one of the most important and beloved figures of the 20th century.

The Modigliani masterpiece, highly sought after by the market and collectors since the 1930s, and now part of the collections of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da USP in São Paulo, Brazil, arrives in Florence at Museo Novecento after about eighty years since it left the Della Ragione Collection.

Purchased by the engineer in 1938, it was likely sold around 1944, a decision that was very difficult for the naval engineer, but through this sale, he sought to recover the resources needed to support younger and experimental artists.

The presentation of this famous painting will thus allow us to reconstruct the critical fortune of the work, evoke Modigliani’s life and career, and examine the passionate involvement of the collector and patron in the affairs of the painters and sculptors close to him.

Driven by an intense passion for beauty and new figurative experiments, Alberto Della Ragione remains today an undisputed example of courageous patronage and refined collecting, responding to the ethical need “not to pass blindly through the art of one’s own time but to give the work of the living artist the legitimate comfort of timely understanding.”

Thanks to the exhibition “Ritorni. From Modigliani to Morandi,” it will be possible to explore in greater detail the trajectories of taste that have inspired Alberto Della Ragione’s choices over the years, making him a key figure in an extraordinary period of art history and collecting in our country. It will also be an opportunity to admire works of luminous and mysterious beauty, the result of Italian genius.