And Fashion, Boldini and Fashion
Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara
"Boldini knew how to reproduce the dazzling sensation that women felt when they were seen in their best moments." With these words Cecil Beaton, among the first and most famous fashion photographers of the twentieth century, sanctioned the talent of the Ferrarese painter and how he captured the voluptuous elegance of the cosmopolitan elites of the Belle Époque, in knowing how to celebrate their ambitions and their refined narcissism.
Boldini was well established in Paris between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the center of gravity of every trend of elegance and modernity. He gave life to a chic and fashionable portrait formula with which he immortalized the protagonists and celebrities of a mythical era, from Robert de Montesquiou to Cléo de Mérode, from Lina Cavalieri to the Marquise Casati.
Fashion played an essential role in his work: initially grasped for its quintessence of modern life, an element that anchors the work to contemporaneity, fashion - understood as clothing, accessory, but also sophisticated expression that transfigures the body into a place of desire - soon became an essential and distinctive attribute of his portraiture. Thanks to his captivating painting, which combines a nervous and dynamic brushstroke with the emphasis on mannered and sensual poses aimed at exalting both the silhouettes of the models and the lines of their clothes, and with the complicity of the creations of great couturiers such as Worth, Doucet, Poiret and the Callot Sisters, Boldini affirms a personal interpretation of the society portrait that becomes a true canon, a model of style and trend that anticipates the formulas and languages of twentieth-century cinema and glamour photography.
The exhibition will therefore investigate, for the first time, the long and fruitful relationship between Boldini and the Parisian haute couture system and the reverberations that this had on his work as a portrait painter as well as on that of painters such as Degas, Sargent, Whistler and Paul Helleu. Organized into thematic sections, each sponsored by writers who have sung the greatness of fashion as an art form, from Baudelaire to Wilde, from Proust to D'Annunzio, the exhibition offers a fascinating journey through paintings, beautiful vintage clothing and precious objects from the iconic value that will tell the story of the relationship between art, fashion and literature in the Belle Époque. All of this will immerse the visitor in the atmosphere of the refined and glittering French metropolis and all its elegant hedonism.
Exhibition curated by Barbara Guidi with the collaboration of Virginia Hill. Organized by the Fondazione Ferrara Arte and the Gallerie d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Ferrara.
