Tuscany Holiday rent BLOG

At  Galleria Farsetti in Florence an exhibition of works by De Chirico and Warhol from January the 14^th up to February the 18^th 2012. At first  it might sound strange to bring together such mythical figures,  finding out  a liason between the metaphysical painter and the founder of the Factory. Two worlds apart, artistically and geographically. But as the artistic director of the art gallery  says,  they both share  serial character techniques,  an obsession  turned into style by Warhol and a planned purpose by De Chirico  who repeated,  in the fifties and sixties ,the same  themes and subjects  of the twenties. The two artists are getting near because,  as the art historian Achille Bonito Oliva says,  they  are able to bring to the  forefront images which,  though featuring their own times, leisurely live outside the storms of history.

The thirty  works from private collections celebrate the Metaphysical  Movement  and its pop  interpretation by the genius of the Factory. The  connection between De Chirico’s European culture, rooted in the Greek and Roman worlds,  and Warhol’s  American one is based on a real meeting in New York City in 1974. De Chirico, an acknowledged master in the European artistic milieu, was at the time  86,  while Warhol, 46 of age, was then  the undisputed  leader of the New York vanguard. The two  outstanding stars  symbolically continued  their dialogue even after De Chirico’s death in 1978 thanks to Carlo Bilotti, an Italian- American businessman and  collector who commissioned Warhol 20 works drawing on the Italian metaphysical painter. The result was the subsequent exhibitions” Warhol versus De Chirico” in Rome in 1982 and in Hamburg one year later.

Here in Florence the main focus is Warhol’s  Hector  and Andromache after De Cherico’s one, dating back to 1917,  here on show,  together with the  bronze sculpture  featuring the same subject of 1971.

Warhol  reinterprets according to the canons of pop art the last hug of the Trojan couple near the Porte Scee,  before Hector’s deadly fight with Achilles. The magic world of the Italian painter  evoking a faraway and glorious past is confronted with the present consumerist myths of the American life .

In spite of that, the spirit of metaphysical painting is kept alive in Warhol’s faithfulness to emotional  silence and objectivity. In addition the repetition of the dummy- lovers in compliance with  consumerist  serial characters  deprives Hector and Andromache of their sacred features and establishes a controversial parallelism with  the Campbell soap tins or the Coca Cola bottles.

In such a “contamination” Warhol has become a classical artist,  standing side by side with De Chirico. An occasion for an intriguing winter escape to the heart of Tuscany, profiting from one of the many accommodations in Florence.