Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera — one of the world’s most venerable art museums — is expanding.
Under director Angelo Crespi, the preeminent home of Italian Old Masters aims to become a flagship of modern and contemporary art. And with the recent inauguration of its new modern collection at Palazzo Citterio, it’s at least partially succeeded.
It’s been a long time coming. In the late 1970s, the Italian state purchased Palazzo Citterio — a grand neoclassical mansion just two doors down from the Brera entrance — with the goal of creating a modern exhibition space dedicated to 20th-century art, complementing the historic works housed in the main Pinacoteca building. At the time, the gallery was promised four incredible collections of modern Italian art from the benefactors Lamberto Vitali, Emilio Jesi, Gianni Mattioli, and Riccardo and Magda Jucker.
The protracted renovations were beset by numerous problems — financial, legal, technical, bureaucratic. Frustrated by the delays, the City of Milan purchased the Jucker collection and redirected it to the city’s Museo del Novecento in 1992. Thirty years later, the Mattioli collection was also moved to the Novecento, which can surely now claim to be the definitive hub for viewing Italian Futurist art. By the time the long-awaited Brera extension opened in December 2024, it dropped the “Brera Modern” rebrand that was reportedly planned, and went simply with Palazzo Citterio, given that the long backstory of the building was already locally famous.
Boccioni and beyond
The grand entrance and buzzy atmosphere are auspicious, but the mood takes a darker turn when you come upon the ground floor’s temporary exhibition, an “immersive” experience of AI-generated art (yes, even at the Brera), linked to a larger exhibition, Renaissance Dreams, at the MEET Digital Culture Center. The Brera is eager to shed its traditional image and prove it can embrace and prefigure the major new trends — but there’s still something that feels slightly unclean about it.
As for the permanent collection, it’s eclectic and hit-or-miss, the loss of the donors strongly felt. But the names are strong pulls — Picasso, Braque, de Chirico and Modigliani among them.
Standing out are the works of Futurism pioneer Umberto Boccioni. Riot in the Gallery (1910) exemplifies the kinetic energy that made Futurism so special; the painting feels alive, pulsating with the giddiness of people witnessing sweeping social and technological changes and longing to be part of the new world-in-flux. The City Rises (1910), Boccioni’s other main work in the gallery, with its maelstrom of horses, offers an eerie premonition of the artist’s death six years later, when he was thrown from his horse during a military exercise in Verona.
But Italian modernism was more than just Futurism. In the late 19th century, Symbolists like Previati and Segantini were already charting a course influenced by the Impressionists. Their dreamy lotus-eating paintings seem at odds with what was to come — if the Futurists thrived on change, the Symbolists seemed to disengage from the world entirely.
That sense of detachment carries over into the metaphysical works of Giorgio de Chirico. The works on display here are hardly his strongest; de Chirico in his later years developed an unfortunate habit of backdating his paintings to make them appear more radical than they were, forcing curators to correct the record.
In this gallery, at least, de Chirico is trumped by his brother, the polymath Alberto Savinio, and his remarkable La cité des promesses (1928), a geometric utopia that calls to mind the sci-fi cityscapes of Antonio Sant’Elia. There’s also a brief nod to Giorgio Morandi’s foray into metaphysical painting, though the exhibit focuses more on his serene still lifes. (I prefer the gallery’s more off-kilter still lifes by Filippo De Pisis.)
The foreign guest star here is Picasso, with his Head of a Bull (1942), a chilling, anguished cry in the midst of World War II and the suffocating shadow of Fascism.
Modern Italian art’s gray areas
While sometimes dismissed as mere “Fascist Art,” Italian art during the Mussolini era was notable for its remarkable diversity. Giorgio de Chirico’s dreamy townscapes inspired the rationalist architects of the interwar period, though no one would call de Chirico a fascist artist. Similarly, Giorgio Morandi’s hazy, introspective still lifes defy any such categorization. Osvaldo Licini, represented here through his trademark “rebellious angels,” was a (latent) communist and refused to participate in the Fascist genuflection that became more pronounced as the regime went on. Nonetheless, he was never excluded from the art scene of the time and was championed by Marinetti, the founder of Futurism.
Another Futurist, Mario Sironi, also found innovative ways to capture the momentum of the rapidly changing world. While Boccioni’s reputation may have been saved by his premature death, Sironi lent his extraordinary talent to works of gaudy Fascist propaganda in the late 1930s and suffered a reputational hit after the war.
At the same time, these artists were in constant dialogue with the Scuola Romana, a stubbornly anti-fascist artistic group active in Rome. Their studio in a large regal palazzo was eventually demolished by Mussolini as it stood in the way of his pompous Via dei Fori Imperiali construction project. Mario Mafai and his wife Antonietta Raphaël, whose works are particularly prominent in the gallery, were Jewish and forced to spend World War II hiding in various Italian cities. Emilio Jesi, one of the main donors of the museum, was also Jewish and also survived World War II in hiding, which adds to the general ambiguity around this period of Italian art.
Boccioni’s death may have also marked the death of Futurism’s naivety. After World War I, the movement became entwined with Fascism, which had positioned itself as the sole ideology capable of harnessing the changes of the time and transforming them into a truly revolutionary politics. We all know how that story ended.
Indeed, there’s a sense of tragedy running through the Palazzo Citterio halls. Boccioni and Modigliani both died in their 30s; Sironi was discredited; Mafai and Raphaël were persecuted; De Pisis was confined to a mental asylum. Da Volpedo committed suicide. Licini, wounded by shrapnel in World War I, had a mental breakdown and rarely left his home in rural Marche. No one, it seems, came out unscathed.
The story behind the works at Palazzo Citterio is rich and nuanced, though this isn’t always reflected in their somewhat disorganized presentation, which leans heavily on a few standout names. When it’s good, it’s very good, but the scattershot arrangement and inconsistent labeling don’t do it any favors.
The labeling hits its low point with two stunning female portraits by Giovanni Boldini; both showcase his signature use of motion blurs that evoke the same energy as a photograph capturing fleeting movement. They’re extraordinary paintings — but were overshadowed, for me, by one placard carrying the startling inscription “donated by Benito Mussolini.” The reference feeds into the recurring stigma of Futurism as being (solely) Fascist art and serves as a troubling reminder of how casually Il Duce’s name can still be bandied about in public. (Since my visit to the exhibition, the gallery has admitted this was “a mistake” and has changed the label to read “donated by Boldini’s widow,” reflecting a request she made to the director of the Brera in 1934.)
So there it is, the new Brera. Perhaps it’s not quite what everyone had expected, but there’s a sense of relief that it’s here at all. For fans of Futurism and modern Italian art, it has done (just) enough to earn a place on the cultural itinerary — though its aspirations to infiltrate the city’s already bustling contemporary art scene remain just that, aspirations.
If you go
Palazzo Citterio
Via Brera 12, Milan
Website
