PARIS - After more than a year of closures and restrictions related to the coronavirus, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1562-1593) revives the Center Pompidou-Metz, a branch of the famous Parisian museum in eastern France, led by the Italian Chiara Parisi.
Beloved when he was still alive, then snubbed by art historians, the Milanese artist known worldwide for his burlesque portraits executed by combining, in a kind of trompe-l'œil, objects or elements of the same genre - including vegetables or fruit and vegetables - has become something of a popular icon.
The Metz exhibition, scheduled from 29 May until 22 November, is presented as a portrait of the "Arcimboldesco Spirit", also through the eyes of the many other artists on display through which its influence is revealed in an unconscious, imagined or dreamed. Hence the title of the exhibition, 'Face à Arcimboldo', in front of Arcimboldo.
Along the route set up in the 'Grande Nef' - the Great Nave of Pompidou-Metz - some of the most emblematic works of the artist (from the Seasons of the Louvre to the Spring of Madrid or the Librarian from the castle of Skokloster, in Sweden) compared with works by other artists of all ages such as Alighiero Boetti, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Victor Brauner, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Enst, Maurizio Cattelan or René Magritte. Along the way, there are also his drawings kept in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Uffizi.
The exhibition, explains Chiara Parisi, has above all "the ambition to reveal the lesser known traits" of the so-called 'Master of Prague' who toured Europe welcomed to the Court of the Habsburgs, in particular, his "fascination for the grotesque, the bizarre, and monstrous, but also for illusion and literary puzzles or research on anthropomorphism or anamorphic mechanisms ". On the occasion of the first retrospective dedicated to Arcimboldo, in 1987, at Palazzo Grassi, in Venice, the curators of the time, Pontus Hultén and Yasha David, caused a sensation, defining Arcimboldo as the precursor of modernity about five centuries in advance. An ambition that also characterizes this new exhibition signed by Chiara Parisi. The Roman graduated in contemporary art history atUniversity La Sapienza of Rome was appointed to lead the Pompidou Metz in the autumn of 2019, among the many examples of exchange between two countries, Italy and France, closely linked by culture.
The Pompidou-Metz center is among the most visited non-Parisian museums in France, also due to its proximity to other European countries, such as Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. .