“The Spajani Collection”

With striking economy—four small rooms—this exhibition outlines some of the major tendencies in Italian art from the past century, and simultaneously chips away at any too-rigid schema thereof. Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, many of the show’s works (the majority of them paintings) date from around midcentury. Strikingly laconic is Piero Dorazio’s oil painting Verso il raffreddamento (Toward a Cooling-Down), 1960, in which slate-green diagonals slice across the surface in a geometry of intersecting lines, creating a tense matrix that unravels only at the canvas’s edges. The organized labor of Dorazio’s strokes defies the more dominant postwar Italian trend of Informalism (a kind of European answer to Abstract Expressionism), to which so many of his contemporaries contributed. Two works by one such peer, Ennio Morlotti, hang nearby. The gestural, impastoed arabesques of his Vegetazione G7 (Vegetation G7), 1962, and Paessaggio a Imbersago (Landscape at Imbersago), 1957, present the perfect foil to Dorazio’s orderly web. Hanging on the same wall is a multimedia collage, Omaggio floreale (Floral Gift), 1959, by Enrico Baj, whose work refuses classification. But his proximity to the countercultural politics of Surrealism belies the image of a postwar avant-garde focused solely on the mechanics of painting or the gestures of Conceptualism.

The rest of the exhibition keeps viewers on their toes. An early painting by Umberto Boccioni of a King Charles spaniel reveals a sentimental and bourgeois side to this eventual Futurist henchman. Eggs on a Book, 1949, by Felice Casorati, a leading light of the ’20s Novecento movement, reveals the stubborn persistence of figuration after WWII. Conversely, Mario Sironi’s Mountains, 1947, distills landscape into two simple, floating forms—as much an anticipation of Lucio Fontana’s early (painted) abstractions as a simplification of Sironi’s own figurative tendencies. Further complicating a neat art-historical account of Italian painting is Mario Donizetti’s vivid Gli istrioni scoprono la commedia dell’arte (The Clowns Discover Commedia Dell’arte), 1959–60, a work of tempera on canvas that is as archaizing in subject as in material. Donizetti’s theme reprises not only the Renaissance but the self-styled renaissance of the Italian “return to order” after WWI (conjured up by the presence of works by Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, and Filippo de Pisis in the next room). Hanging nearby, de Chirico’s self-plagiarizing copy of his own early metaphysical painting, The Song of Love, 1914—taking form here as Old-Fashioned Cast with Rubber Glove, 1955—further hammers home the complex, intersecting genealogies of Italian painting at midcentury.