In the center of Rovigo, the Renaissance Palazzo Roverella preserves like a treasure chest until June 30th the heart of Paris at the end of the 19th century, an extraordinary concentration of innovation and destruction, an epochal passage for the history of art and beyond.
"It is referred to as Belle Epoque only in retaliation after the First World War, in reality a time of social upheavals", explains Francesco Parisi.
Dominating that metropolis was the nest of streets like woven straw of Montmartre where Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec spent the most intense and destructive years of his short life.
Now the multifaceted creativity of this artist who passed away at just 37 years old, marked by a serious genetic disease, overwhelmed by alcoholism and passions, lives again in a large exhibition that bears his name and not only recounts his various aspects, but immerses them in the reality from which they were inspired in absolute originality, overcoming the limit that sees him consigned to history as a simple, albeit ingenious and absolutely mythical, creator of billboards.
"An exhibition that puts the artist back at the center of his context", says Fanny Girard.
Yes, because here too his sketches, drawings, posters, paintings demonstrate once again that the aristocratic artist who had chosen the bohemian world did not belong to any current but traveled on the intelligent, almost seer-like thread of innovation, glimpsing threads and themes of the world to come.
There is the joyful dynamism of the dancers of the Moulin Rouge and the desperation of the suburbs of the industrial world, there is the graphic trait of advertising and the absolute and decontextualized color of abstractionism.
But he is not the only one in the 200 works collected in Palazzo Roverella.
There are his teachers like Corman, the painters he loved like Degas, his fellow students like van Gogh and then there are Boldini, De Nittis just to name a few.
The exhibition is curated by Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, Francesco Parisi and Fanny Girard - who directs the museum dedicated to the artist in Albi - with the collaboration of Nicholas Zmelty and offers various thematic insights which, as his great-grandson Bernard du Vignaud explains at the presentation this morning in Rovigo "open many completely original doors on my great uncle and put him back at the center of his era".
Starting from the one about "Paris 1885-1900", "Le Chat Noir" or the café where they were, "Toulouse-Lautrec and his artist friends" like van Gogh and "The renewal of graphics", then the one about absinthe which would lead a generation to ruin until it was banned in 1914.
Very important is the unpublished section dedicated to the French artistic movement "Les Arts Incohérents", a forerunner of techniques adopted by the avant-garde of the twentieth century.
This section, curated by Johan Naldi, presents absolutely unpublished works because they were thought lost and were found in 2018 in the cellar of a descendant of the artists and are exhibited here for the first time.
Here is the first monochrome work in history.
"In short - Parisi summarizes - not a superficial exhibition like those on him that have taken place over the last 30 years, but an exhibition with solid scientific foundations to make Palazzo Roverella a place of research".
This is also thanks to the support of the Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo Foundation and Intesa Sanpaolo.
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