MARIA LUISA AND SANTE ASTALDI’S COLLECTION

Some of the highlights of Casa Cavazzini's collections are represented by the works of art that Maria Luisa Costantini (1899 -1982) and her husband Sante Astaldi (1895 -1982) bequeated to the city of Udine in 1983 in fulfilment of their testamentary wishes. This bequest was related to the Friulian origin of Maria Luisa Astaldi, who was born in Tricesimo but had spent most of her life far from her homeland, of which she had, however, kept an affectionate memory. Astaldis' more than 190 works of art, then, entered the civic collections, integrating the museum's section devoted to 20th-century Italian art.

After her marriage to engineer Sante Astaldi, one of the emerging personalities of Italian entrepreneurship in public works after World War II, Maria Luisa Astaldi devoted herself to her studies in Anglistics. A woman of broad and refined culture, a passionate cultural animator, she also nurtured a special interest in art. Starting in the 1930s and in the following decades, the collection grew at a fast pace and prestigious artworks were acquired through private galleries or at major national and international exhibitions of the time. The display follows, through the museum's rooms, the collection's development from the first acquisitions in the 1930s to the last purchases made by the couple in the 1960s.

THE CORTINA EXHIBITION (1941)

This room displays the artworks exhibited in August 1941 at the First Exhibition of Contemporary Art Collections held in Cortina d'Ampezzo at the Palazzo Duca d'Aosta.
The exhibition, sponsored by the Minister Giuseppe Bottai, aimed to promote Italian collecting of contemporary art. The Astaldi lent Giorgio de Chirico's rare ceramics purchased at the Barbaroux Gallery in Milan in 1941, as well as Gianfilippo Usellini's paintings La Sirena (The Mermaid) and Il ragazzo che disegna (The Drawing Boy), that they had bought at the 1940 Venice Biennale, which are both characterised by a refined symbolism melted into a neo-15thcentury style. Next to them, there are Mario Sironi, with a Female nude (1928) from the Galleria del Milione in Milan, Filippo de Pisis and Ottone Rosai, the latter with the large painting of Giocatori di Toppa (Toppa Players), and Carlo Carrà with Navicello a Venezia (A Navicello Boat in Venice). These artists were already renowned in the national and international art market in wich Maria Luisa Astaldi operated following her collecting interest and demonstrating her appreciation of their modern style.

THE 1940s

During the last years of the Second World War (1939-1945), Maria Luisa and Sante Astaldi continued to invest in their art collection, purchasing works by both established and emerging Italian artists.

It was during this time that Carlo Carrà's Marina col palo (Marina with a pole) (1943), which the painter exhibited in the same year at the Galleria dello Zodiaco in Rome, entered the collection alongside new
artworks by Filippo de Pisis. Alongside these well-known names are those of Giuseppe Capogrossi with Figura in riposo (Resting Figure) (1941) and Franco Gentilini with Adolescente (Adolescent) (1942), a work from the artist's early training between Paris and Rome presented at the Venice Biennale that year. Also worthy of attention is the figure of Renato Birolli, a leading exponent of the Milanese artistic
group gathered around the magazine Corrente, whose Sogno di Zeno (Zeno's Dream) (1942), a work exhibited by Birolli himself at the Venice Biennale in 1942, was purchased by collectors. A special mention
goes to the works by Alberto Savinio, documenting the long friendship between the Astaldis and the painter, particularly in the artwork Il protettore dei porti (The Harbour's Protector) (1950), which bears witness to the surreal and fantastic vein that the artist continued to cultivate even in the last years of his life.

THE 1950s

During the 1950s, the collection grew in an abstract way. This decade was characterised by a focus on works of art which aimed to integrate and enrich the artistic movements already present in the collection and to record the evolution of the historical Avant-gardes: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, who, having now reached unattainable market prices, were acquired through prints and lithographs.

At the 1954 edition of the Venice Biennale, moreover, the Astaldis bought Ben Nicholson’s Painting (1940). It shows a compositional structure organised on pure geometric abstraction derived from Piet Mondrian's renowned production.

Meanwhile, the Astaldis focused olso on figurative works, such as Gino Severini's Natura Morta con Chitarra (Still Life with a Guitar) (1919), which dates back to the painter's Cubist phase.

THE 1960s AND 1970s

In the early 1960s, the collection was further enriched with abstract artworks. These Astaldis focused on Anton Zoran Mušič's Cavallini che passano (Trotting Young Horses) (1950) and Ecran naturel (1962), both characterised by a powerful poetic transfiguration between memory and emotion, for which Maria Luisa Astaldi had a strong inclination.

Moreover, in the 1960s the Astaldis purchased Giuseppe Santomaso's works directly in the painter's Venetian studio, such as Paesaggio animato (Animated Landscape) (1964), in which colour is no longer a tool but an active pictorial subject and an event that materialises on the surface of the work. The artist, who was an active member of the Gruppo degli Otto (Group of Eight) for which Lionello Venturi had coined the definition of “abstract-concrete painting”, develops in these paintings a language based on the emphasis of its gestural component, as well as on careful study of light, colour and paint.