Until Jan. 6, 2026, an exhibition in the halls of Villa Bertelli in Forte dei Marmi allows visitors to take a journey inside the creative universe of Mino Maccari (Siena, 1898 - Rome, 1989). Entitled The Maccari Collection. In my living room, and curated by Davide Pugnana, the exhibition features an anthology of works from the collection of the artist’s heirs, offering the public an opportunity to traverse decades of pictorial, graphic and narrative production by one of the freest and most unclassifiable figures in twentieth-century Italian art.
The title chosen for the exhibition focuses on a recurring place in Maccari’s imagination: the living room. A space of domestic intimacy, cosy and muffled, which becomes a metaphor for a private dimension but at the same time a privileged observatory of the human comedy. It is precisely in this microcosm, amid shadows and silences, that not only the works but also the artist’s own memory are concentrated. Paintings, watercolors, drawings, diaries and letters crowd together like immobile presences resistant to time, composing a visual and verbal landscape that restores the vastness and complexity of Maccari’s production.
The exhibition spans a broad time span, from the 1930s to the 1970s. A dilated chronological scanning that allows us to grasp the evolution of the artist’s language and, at the same time, the surprising consistency of a gaze capable of crossing profoundly different artistic seasons without ever losing its own identity. The works on display also establish a dialogue with the permanent collection of the Museo del Quarto Platano housed in the rooms of Villa Bertelli, strengthening the link between the temporary exhibition and the stable heritage of the exhibition venue.
Mino Maccari, who was born in Siena in 1898 and died in Rome in 1989, was a draughtsman, painter and engraver, the protagonist of a long artistic career that saw him traverse much of the century as a protagonist. A funambulist of the line and master of formal synthesis, Maccari was able to combine a biting and satirical sign with an acute and implacable ability to observe the vices and folds of society. His ironic and sometimes fierce gaze translated into a gallery of figures that still populate the collective imagination today.
The exhibition aims to restore the full variety of this iconographic universe. It features the famous female figures, the so-called hilarious and melancholy damsels, standing on their heels and wrapped in winking stockings, suspended between coquetry and restlessness. Next to them parade hierarchs deformed by sudden pen swerves, bureaucrats, strutting or shrunken dictators, from Napoleon to Mussolini, observed with a gaze that unmasks power through irony and caricature.
An important chapter of Maccari’s production is devoted to portraits of friends, artists and men of letters caught under a whimsical and caricatured lens. The exhibition shows traces of this world of intellectual relations that includes figures such as Flaiano, Morandi, De Chirico, Longanesi, Soffici, Soldati, Brancati, Baldini, Moravia, Longhi and Anna Banti, Oppo, Cardarelli, Malaparte, Ungaretti and many others. Portraits that are never mere likenesses, but psychological and narrative interpretations, capable of capturing the essence of the characters through the sign.
There is no lack of the microcosm of family affections, rendered particularly in the portraits of Annie and her children, where the stroke becomes more intimate and participatory, while maintaining that ironic tension that runs through all her work. Alongside the portraits, the exhibition features collective scenes ranging from the mundane lightness of ballets and salons, animated by a gossipy and theatrical swarming, to the more dramatic images of shootings. From the embrace of lovers to the fantastical presences of satyrs and devils, Maccari’s work constantly moves between different registers, oscillating between comedy and tragedy.
Maccari’s strength also lies in his ability to traverse the artistic currents of the 20th century without ever fully adhering to any one. Belonging to the generation of Carrà, De Pisis and Morandi, the artist soon won a stable place in the canon of Italian contemporary art history. He went through seasons marked by poetics of rupture, returns to order, stylistic traumas and afterthoughts, without ever allowing himself to be caged by ephemeral fashions, ideological schools or pre-established aesthetic catechisms.
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| Forte dei Marmi, Villa Bertelli opens Mino Maccari's living room with an exhibition |
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