At the GAM in Turin, an exhibition on Moravia and his interest in the visual arts

Until June 4, 2023, GAM in Turin presents the exhibition Alberto Moravia. I Don’ t Know Why I Wasn’t a Painter, curated by Luca Beatrice and Elena Loewenthal. Dedicated to Alberto Moravia in the context of the project Born to narrate. Rediscovering Alberto Moravia, the exhibition was conceived and realized by the Fondazione Circolo dei Lettori with GAM and the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in collaboration with theAssociazione Fondo Alberto Moravia, Bompiani editore and the Gallerie d’Italia.

A major protagonist of artistic and intellectual life for a large part of the 20th century, Moravia lends himself to a variety of suggestions, including painting, cinema, photography and literature.

Among the many fields of interest beyond literature, that of the visual arts represents more than a passion for Alberto Moravia. His first art writings date from 1934 to 1990, the year of his death. He published in magazines and newspapers, including the Turin Gazzetta del Popolo and the Corriere della Sera, and wrote catalog texts and prefaces for various artists. This interest stems in part from his family upbringing. His father was passionate about painting, and his sister Adriana Pincherle, trained with Mafai and Scipione, was an artist of some stature in the Roman milieu. Since the 1930s, but particularly after the war, artists, writers, and intellectuals frequented the same environment and places. In several novels, art appears among the vicissitudes of some characters, such as the failed painter Dino and his alter ego Balestrieri, modest and dated, in La Noia (1960).

In 2017, the publishing house Bompiani collected, in a valuable volume, most of Alberto Moravia’s writings on art, in which painting takes center stage. From the 1930s to the 1950s Moravia followed Enrico Paulucci and Carlo Levi in the period of the Six, began the long association with Renato Guttuso that was to last a lifetime, and carefully observed the Roman situation, from Giuseppe Capogrossi to Mario Mafai. In the following season, in the Rome of the 1960s, the capital of international art, he writes repeatedly about Mario Schifano, Giosetta Fioroni, Titina Maselli and the photographer Elisabetta Catalano to whom he owes one of the most intense portraits. He also loves Antonio Recalcati, Piero Guccione and Fabrizio Clerici.

The exhibition in the Wunderkammer space is proposed as an ideal collection of the artists the writer esteemed and to whom he dedicated his pen, and presents about thirty works from the Casa Museo Alberto Moravia in Rome as well as from private collections and a substantial nucleus of paintings and drawings preserved at GAM. What emerges is a portrait of Italian art through literature, not always in line with dominant trends or fashions. The works chosen for the exhibition are in fact flanked by fragments of texts mostly taken from Alberto Moravia’s volume Non so perché non ho fatto il pittore (edited by Alessandra Grandelis, Milan, Bompiani, 2017) from which the exhibition takes its title and which evoke the relationship of esteem and very often friendship with the authors of the works presented.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Silvana Editoriale that includes images of the works on display and essays by the curators.

The artists in the exhibition: Gisberto Ceracchini, Carlo Levi, Enrico Paulucci, Giacomo Manzù, Renato Guttuso, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Mario Mafai, Renato Birolli, Onofrio Martinelli, Fabrizio Clerici, Leonor Fini, Alberto Ziveri, Mino Maccari, Mario Lattes, Antonio Recalcati, Adriana Pincherle, Sergio Vacchi, Piero Guccione, Giosetta Fioroni, Carlo Guarienti, Titina Maselli, Mario Schifano, Elisabetta Catalano.

For more info: gamtorino.it.

Ph. Credit Perottino

At the GAM in Turin, an exhibition on Moravia and his interest in the visual arts

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