RARE AND IMPORTANT, LARGE POSTER BY PICASSO MADE FOR THE MILANO MOSTORA IN 1953.
HISTORY
The first bombs fell on Milan at the end of 1942 and they were death and destruction. Other massive bombings followed the following year: the war was not only taking place on the front, everyone was now involved in a collective tragedy.
Milan changed face. Buildings, schools, churches, monuments, factories, stations destroyed. The historic heart of the city was unrecognizable, ruins and rubble everywhere.
Despair and horror: it was not easy to leave all this behind, but since the Liberation of April 25, the Milanese were ready to roll up their sleeves, to work tirelessly, as was their nature, on the reconstruction necessary for life to resume. .
The great exhibition at the Royal Palace dedicated to the genius of Picasso was symbolic and brought to Milan the work that symbolized the tragedy of war: Guernica.
GUERNICA EXHIBITION IN MILAN
The work, however, arrived in Milan three weeks after the opening of the exhibition, on October 5, and remained there for a little over a month, until November 14, well before the end of the exhibition.
Of the three months of the exhibition (September 26-December 31, 1953), Picasso's Guernica was shown in Milan for only a little over a month, a third of the total, so much so that Guernica did not even appear in the first catalogue of the exhibition at the Royal Palace.
The exhibition was nevertheless considered a success: Picasso had promised Attilio Rossi seventy works, even though, due to the limited exhibition space in Milan, the additional works proposed by the artist currently on display were about twenty.
The exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan could thus count on 329 works, compared to 248 in Rome.
When Attilio Rossi informed Fernanda Wittgens and Franco Russoli that he had obtained Picasso's approval for the exhibition of Guernica at the Palazzo Reale, the organizing committee rushed to launch a rapid restoration with plasterers and masons to make the room "more presentable". the Caryatids.
Attilio Rossi had to intervene quickly to stop the work, given that the dilapidated context of the Caryatids room had been precisely the added value that had convinced Picasso to bring the work to Milan, beyond the merit and the causes that had led to the creation of the room.
this state of dilapidation.
The atmosphere of the Caryatids Room with the other works of denunciation by Guernica and Picasso must have been truly unique, and is perhaps unimaginable today when, after the restorations of 2000, the layers of soot actually caused by the fire of 1943 were removed, a choice that eliminated perhaps one of the few, if not the only, traces truly linked to the war and not to the subsequent deterioration.
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