The MAN Museum and the Municipality of Orosei, in collaboration with the Superintendence for Architectural, Landscape, Historical, Artistic and Ethnoanthropological Heritage for the Provinces of Sassari and Nuoro and with the Department of Humanistic and Social Sciences of the University of Sassari, are pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition “The invention of Sardinia. Painting from the MAN and Mus’A collections – 1900-1950”.

Curated by Giuliana Altea and Maria Paola Dettori, the exhibition aims to provide a detailed picture of pictorial production in Sardinia in the first fifty years of the 20th century through some notable works coming mainly from the collections of the MANe Museum of the Mus’A in Sassari. The itinerary develops in two sections, the first dedicated to the process of construction of a new Sardinian identity by the artists (MAN Museum in Nuoro), the second dedicated to the theme of the representation of the Sardinian landscape (L’Ormeggio di Orosei). The project takes the opportunity of the return to Nuoro, after restoration work, of some works from the MAN’s Sardinian art collection, including “The Expulsion of the Arrendadore” by Mario Delitala, which will be presented to the public in the exhibition together with the four allegorical lunettes that made up the decoration of the council hall of
Municipality of Nuoro (1924-26).

On Saturday 15 June, the opening day of the section dedicated to the Sardinian landscape, at 5.00 pm, in the Siena Room of the Giovanni Guiso Museum in Orosei, a conference open to the public will be held in which some of the themes addressed in the exhibition will be explored in depth. Among the speakers Lorenzo Giusti, director of the MAN Museum, Giuliana Altea, professor of History of Contemporary Art at the University of Sassari, Maria Paola Dettori, official of the
Superintendency of Sassari, Maria Albai, restorer, Antonella Camarda, art historian, Michele Carta, researcher (Giuseppe Guiso Study Center).

The first fifty years of the twentieth century were those in which Sardinian artists and intellectuals developed and defined a new image of Sardinia. The perception of an economically and socially backward land is replaced by the vision of an uncontaminated Eden, immune from the failures of civilization and progress. The agro-pastoral culture, once considered an expression of backwardness, is now taken as the cornerstone of the new representation of the Island. The Sardinian rural reality is first observed through the filter of a naturalism still of a nineteenth-century nature by painters such as Giacinto Satta, Antonio Ballero, Mario Paglietti, Giuseppe Altana. Then, in the primitivist climate of the 1910s, she was portrayed in an exotic and decorative key by Giuseppe Biasi and by young people influenced by her example, such as Carmelo Floris, Mario Mossa De Murtas, Edina Altara, Melkiorre Melis, Paolo Maninchedda, Tona Scano.

The experience of war and the trenches marks the spread of the new feeling of identity at a popular level; consolidated with the birth of the Sardinian party, this did not disappear even during fascism. In the 1920s, it was above all Mario Delitala, Filippo Figari and Stanis Dessy who acted as interpreters with a realist painting nourished by classical echoes, centered on the themes – typical both of the ideology of the regime and of the Sardinian ethics – of work, family, faith . These are themes exemplary reflected in Mario Delitala’s decoration for the council room of the Municipality of Nuoro (1926), of which, on the occasion of the restoration of the large MAN painting “The Expulsion of the Arrendadore”, already the focal center of the room, it will be reconstructed in shows the entire decorative complex.
In the years between the two wars, with the contribution of artists such as Cesare Cabras, Pietro Antonio Manca, Giovanni Ciusa Romagna, Antonio Mura, Tarquinio Sini, Francesca Devoto, the foundations of a regionalist iconography were laid which would dominate Sardinian painting even in the two decades later, while the robust initial realism would subsequently weaken and soften with the fading of the ideological assumptions that had guided its birth. But already during the 1930s alternative paths to the prevailing discourse show two eccentric figures such as that of Brancaleone Cugusi da Romana, with a solemn figuration, full of Renaissance echoes but also imbued with romanticism, and of Salvatore Fancello, whose tender, fantastic transfiguration and ironic of a Sardinia relived in memory closes the exhibition itinerary. THE SARDO LANDSCAPE | THE MOORING, Orosei
The second section is more specifically focused on the theme of the representation of the Sardinian landscape.
Intensely frequented by protagonists of the local context of the early twentieth century such as Antonio Ballero and
Felice Melis Marini, the landscape appears in a new light in the works of the painters of the 1910s, a period in which
the habit of staying in places in the interior of the island began to spread among artists. Joseph’s
Biasi, Mario Mossa De Murtas or Melkiorre Melis is a landscape “in costume” as are the human presences
who populate it; a colorful backdrop for the unfolding of festivals and processions, stylized in geometric cadences
which transform the panorama of the mountain valleys and villages into nativity scenes.
The more austere and meditative climate of the post-war period is reflected in the sober melancholy of the views
of Carmelo Floris and in the monumentality of those of Filippo Figari, as, later, in the dry colors of the villages
by Giovanni Ciusa Romagna. But we can say that everyone, protagonists and supporting actors of painting, dedicate themselves to landscape
Sardinian of the first half of the twentieth century, dividing up areas and areas of relevance: Olzai to Carmelo Floris, Aritzo to
Stanis Dessy, Arzana to Mario Delitala, Campidano to Cesare Cabras, etc.
After the Second World War, the intense local characterization of early twentieth-century views definitively disappeared
to make way for more generic images, often suffused with romance and nostalgia. Ideal caesura, e
end of the exhibition, is the landscape with flock by Maria Lai from 1959, in which organic and inorganic nature come together
seamlessly in the extreme formal reduction of the image.

The second section is more specifically focused on the theme of the representation of the Sardinian landscape.
Intensely frequented by protagonists of the local context of the early twentieth century such as Antonio Ballero and
Felice Melis Marini, the landscape appears in a new light in the works of the painters of the 1910s, a period in which
the habit of staying in places in the interior of the island began to spread among artists. Joseph’s
Biasi, Mario Mossa De Murtas or Melkiorre Melis is a landscape “in costume” as are the human presences
who populate it; a colorful backdrop for the unfolding of festivals and processions, stylized in geometric cadences
which transform the panorama of the mountain valleys and villages into nativity scenes.
The more austere and meditative climate of the post-war period is reflected in the sober melancholy of the views
of Carmelo Floris and in the monumentality of those of Filippo Figari, as, later, in the dry colors of the villages
by Giovanni Ciusa Romagna. But we can say that everyone, protagonists and supporting actors of painting, dedicate themselves to landscape
Sardinian of the first half of the twentieth century, dividing up areas and areas of relevance: Olzai to Carmelo Floris, Aritzo to
Stanis Dessy, Arzana to Mario Delitala, Campidano to Cesare Cabras, etc.
After the Second World War, the intense local characterization of early twentieth-century views definitively disappeared
to make way for more generic images, often suffused with romance and nostalgia. Ideal caesura, e
end of the exhibition, is the landscape with flock by Maria Lai from 1959, in which organic and inorganic nature come together
seamlessly in the extreme formal reduction of the image.