Edited by Ilaria Bonacossa and Francesca Serrati

Assistant curator: Michela Murialdo

In collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art of Villa Croce, Genoa

Maria Cernuschi Ghiringhelli was a unique figure in the panorama of Italian art between the two wars. Considered the “abstract muse” of Carlo Belli and Osvaldo Licini, at the beginning of 1930 she became a passionate supporter of Italian and international abstract art, managing to intercept the most innovative proposals with great independence of judgement. An Italian Peggy Guggenheim, capable of maintaining solid relationships with artists, even the younger and not yet established ones, since what interested her most was “ follow and if possible encourage the developments of a type of artistic research in which I believed ”.

Starting from some key works of Italian abstract art of the 1930s, passing through the perceptivist and preconceptual research of the 1960s, up to the Optical art and New Painting of the 1970s and 1980s, the exhibition, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa and Francesca Serrati, traces the history of the collection – preserved at the Villa Croce Museum in Genoa – in dialogue with some of the main artistic movements and authors of the Italian twentieth century.

Maria Cernuschi’s encounter with art is due to her husband Gino Ghiringhelli, artist and owner of the Milanese gallery “Il Milione”, a fundamental place for the promotion of abstract art in Italy. Between 1934 and 1935 the gallery presented the work of artists such as Kandinsky, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Albers, Fontana, Licini, Melotti and was the first exhibition space to host works by Soldati, Radice, Rho and Veronesi. In 1933 the Gallery had supported the publication of Kn, art criticism essay by Carlo Belli, dedicated to Maria Cernuschi Ghiringhelli, and defined by Kandinsky as “the gospel of abstract art”.

In 1940, the year of her separation from her husband, Maria Cernuschi began to purchase a series of paintings which became evidence of a new phase of her life, representing, more than a documentary choice, a sentimental impulse which led her to define her collection not as a rational collection, but more simply as “his” collection (“my paintings”). In 1950, tired of the Milanese environment, she moved to Liguria, where she breathed a new, culturally lively climate, thanks to the presence of a large group of artists active above all in the ceramic factories of Albisola.

Starting from 1965, purchases became more and more frequent and the choices more rigorous. The acquisition criteria abandon the private sphere and are increasingly oriented towards the attempt to organically document the results of contemporary artistic research, especially Italian, in the field of abstraction. A choice which, in the Seventies, found an element of specificity in the attention to the research carried out in the Ligurian context.

Maria Cernuschi Ghiringhelli was able to grasp the elements of novelty in the artistic production of her time without waiting for their consecration by critics or the market, as evidenced by the dates – all early – of Piero Manzoni’s works, of which in the exhibition it is possible see one of the first Achromes, by Agostino Bonalumi, Lucio Fontana, Osvaldo Licini, Gino Ghiringhelli, Bruno Munari and numerous other authors. A foresight in choices supported and supported by the close and never interrupted relationship with the artistic generations active before the war, and in particular Melotti, Soldati, Munari and Fontana.

If the interest of a private collection can be traced back above all to its originality, to its “difference” from others, dictated by a vision, meetings and personal experiences, that of Maria Cernuschi can undoubtedly be considered one of the Italian collections most interesting of the twentieth century.

“An abstract vision. Works from the Maria Cernuschi Ghiringhelli Collection” aims to present to the public the heart of this private collection, representative of a fundamental historical and artistic moment, but also a mirror of the stories, choices, impulses and personal feelings of its creator.