ANDREA VILIANI
Head and Curator, CRRI-Castello di Rivoli Research Institute
La collezione di Arte Contemporanea del Museo di Capodimonte: i suoi artisti, opere, mostre e mecenati
In this lecture, Andrea Viliani, Head and Curator of the CRRI-Castello di Rivoli Research Institute in Turin and former Director of the MADRE Museum (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina), introduces the history of the collection of contemporary art at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples. Formed within a museum of Old Masters at a time when there was still no institution in Naples dedicated to contemporary art, the collection developed in close and continuous dialogue with Capodimonte’s own artistic heritage.
The story began in 1978, when Raffaello Causa, Superintendent of Arts in Naples, invited the Italian painter Alberto Burri to hold a retrospective at the Capodimonte Museum. Causa’s gambit was to display Burri’s work within the suite of galleries dedicated to painting of the Neapolitan Baroque. For this exhibition, Burri created one of his greatest works, Grande Cretto Nero, in which the effects of craquelure and chiaroscuro are in direct dialogue with the pictorial surface of Caravaggio’s Flagellation. Since then, the Capodimonte Museum has invited artists from Italy and abroad (Louise Bourgeois, Daniel Buren, Joseph Beuys, and Andy Warhol, to name just a few) to create works of art inspired by its collections of paintings, sculpture and decorative arts.
In 2017, almost forty years after Burri's exhibition, the Grande Cretto Nero itself became a historical work that inspired the Swiss artist John Armleder to create his mural Split! The mural is positioned directly opposite Burri’s work, and uses colors found in the museum’s collection of decorative arts. In December 2017 Andrea Viliani and Capodimonte Director Sylvain Bellenger co-curated Carta Bianca: Capodimonte Imaginaire, an experimental exhibition in which ten figures from the world of art and culture were invited to curate galleries in the museum drawing from objects in the permanent collection. In two installations by the artists Giulio Paolini and Francesco Vezzoli, works from the collection were brought together in a new way to create new meanings, demonstrating that all art, including art of the past, is always contemporary, because it belongs to our time.
This lecture is a part of the series Il golfo di Napoli e oltre: arte e cultura dall'antichità ai giorni nostri / The bay of Naples and beyond: art and culture from antiquity to the present, a summer lecture series presented digitally by the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History and the Centro per la Storia dell'Arte e dell'Architettura delle Città Portuali / La Capraia.
