Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
Spazio Testori
3–21 December 2016
10 January – 24 February 2017
Opening hours: Tuesday–Friday: 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
Weekend: guided tours by appointment: info@casatestori.it
Closed: Monday
7–9 December 2016
Not yet twenty years old, between 1941 and 1943 Giovanni Testori published numerous art criticism pieces in Via Consolare, Pattuglia, and other university magazines of the GUF, also making his debut as a draftsman and playwright. As the global conflict intensified, although his creativity was in full ferment, opportunities to see the results in print diminished, almost drying up in the following months.
1943 marked a turning point: the book on the drawings of Henry Matisse, which was appreciated by the painter himself, brought his book publications to a halt until 1951, and his special feature Homage to Painting, published in the May–June issue of Pattuglia, persuaded Mussolini to shut down the magazine. In August, Milan suffered its most devastating bombings, including severe damage to its artistic heritage. Testori set up a studio in the attic of his family’s large house in Sormano (CO), where he had taken refuge with his family, transforming it into a crossroads for artists and critics such as Ennio Morlotti and Mario De Micheli.
After a silent 1944, 1945 marked a public restart, for Italy as well as for Testori.
It was the year of the publication of Laude by Jacopone, which he illustrated with twenty drawings made the previous year. The selected drawings express his intense commitment to sacred art, a theme that runs throughout the 1940s and that deserves specific attention, given the large number of unpublished works discovered in recent years and the variety of subjects addressed.
Yet the sacred is only one of the themes explored by Testori. The months around the Liberation of 25 April are marked by various expressions of his genius, from painting to poetry to engaged criticism. These are emblematic moments of a new beginning: Giovanni Testori’s 1945, here recounted in six episodes.