Le Galleries, located inside Palazzo Massari, include the civic 19th-century collections, the Giovanni Boldini Museum, and the museum dedicated to Filippo de Pisis (1896-1956). The latter, arranged on the ground floor, was established on the centenary of the birth of the Ferrara painter and following the acquisition of an exceptional core of de Pisis’s works from the collection belonging to Manlio Malabotta and donated to the Municipality of Ferrara by his wife Franca Fenga. It consists of twenty-four oil paintings – including ‘Rotten Fish’ (1928), the famous ‘Struck Gladiolus’ (1930), the ‘Portrait of Allegro’ (1940), and the ‘Rose in the Bottle’ (1950) – seventy drawings, five watercolors, and fifteen engravings. The core, which came to increase the already existing de Pisis collection, is exhibited in a special section of the museum. The museum has been open to the public since 1998, in its current layout organized into monographic rooms dedicated to Ferrarese artists; and with the presence of a few but significant pieces by Carlo Carrà and Mario Sironi. The rooms document the local artistic creativity of the first half of the last century, a period in which Ferrara was the nursery of interesting and incisive personalities and artistic currents, such as modernist expressionism, Metaphysics, and Novecento. There are rooms dedicated to Aroldo Bonzagni, Achille Funi, Arrigo Minerbi, Giuseppe Virgili, Enzo Nenci, Annibale Zucchini, Mimì Quilici Buzzacchi, Aldo Bandinelli, Roberto Melli, Mario Pozzati, and Filippo de Pisis. The collection related to the latter is divided into two important cores, which document the painter’s journey in an anthology way: the first acquired by the Giuseppe Pianori Foundation and the Ferrara Savings Bank, the second, the Manlio and Franca Calabotta collection, gifted to the city by the widow of the Triestine notary. De Pisis’s poetics are clearly expressed in the rooms with works dealing with his favorite themes, still lifes, and range from his beginnings of a crepuscular metaphysical nature to French post-impressionist influences, which led his style to decline existential content with increasingly abbreviated and rarefied signs; the Malabotta collection also left the museum a varied selection of drawings, watercolors, pastels, and lithographs by the artist.
In 2004, the Ferrara Municipal Administration presented to MusArc the goal of creating a Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, designed by Massimo and Gabriella Caramassi, which envisages the logistical redistribution of the artistic institutes located between Palazzo dei Diamanti, Palazzo Bevilacqua Massari, and Palazzina dei Cavalieri di Malta, with the incorporation, in the integrated museum system, of Palazzo Prosperi Sacrati as the future home of the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum “Filippo de Pisis.” The space division project provides for the annexation to the Center of the Illustration Museum to remove it from the isolation of its location on via Frescobaldi and thus allow a greater number of visitors; furthermore, on the ground floor, integration of the Michelangelo Antonioni Museum and the Museum of the Risorgimento and Resistance is underway; finally, the Multipurpose Hall, which during the restoration period served as a temporary depot for works of art, has now returned to function as a multifunctional cultural space benefiting initiatives of the Municipal Administration and private galleries.
The museum’s sculpture collection is mainly displayed in the internal rooms, but some works by Rita da Re, Maurizio Bonora, Man Ray, Carmelo Capello, Aldo Calò, Filippo Tallone, Augusto Murer, Emilio Greco, Marcello Mascherini, and Laura Rivalta are also located in the courtyard of Palazzo Massari. Inside the sections of the Boldini Museum and the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, there are works by sculptors from the Ferrara area such as Roberto Melli, Arrigo Minerbi, Giuseppe Virgili, Annibale Zucchini; and also works by Enzo Nenci, Egidio Casarotti, and Laerte Milani. The Boldini Museum, on the occasion of the “Art Fall. Ferrara contemporanea” exhibition, hosted video screenings such as “Pletora. The Gift” (2008), installations like “Manifesto” (2009), and performances such as “Kin Knight King” (2010).
Information about the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum “Filippo de Pisis”
Corso Porta Mare, 9,
44121 Ferrara (Ferrara)
0532243415
artemoderna@comune.fe.it
https://www.artecultura.fe.it/index.phtml
Source: MIBACT
