A fascinating journey through paintings, period clothes and precious objects, tells the links between Boldini, fashion and literature in the background of the sparkling Paris of the Belle Époque.
In July 1931, on the occasion of the first retrospective set up in Paris, "Vogue" dedicated an article with the emblematic title to Giovanni Boldini, who died just a few months earlier. Giovanni Boldi, Painter of elegance. At a time when the portraitist who for decades had been the arbiter of Parisian taste left the scene, the myth of an artist began who, having created a modern and disruptive canon of beauty, would have inspired generations of designers, from Christian Dior to Giorgio Armani, from Alexander McQueen to John Galliano.
The magnetism of Boldini's portraits, in which his models appear worldly, sure of themselves and of their power of seduction, owes much to the relationship that the painter had with the nascent fashion industry to which, in his turn, he made a remarkable contribution . Organized by the Ferrara Arte Foundation and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna-Giovanni Boldini Museum of Ferrara, the Boldini exhibition and fashion tells the story of this fascinating bond for the first time: the result of a long study that allowed the reconstruction of the documents of the dense network of social and professional relationships of the artist, the review illustrates how Boldini was able to become an interpreter of the fashion of the time until he came to influence his choices, like a contemporary trendsetter.
Established in Paris between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a crossroads of every trend of taste and modernity, Boldini has immortalized the voluptuous elegance of the cosmopolitan elite of the Belle Époque. His talented brush has delivered to posterity the images of the protagonists of that mythical era - from Robert de Montesquiou to Cléo de Mérode to the Marchesa Casati - helping to make them real icons of glamor.
If in the beginning fashion captures the artist's attention as a quintessence of modern life, an element that anchors the work of art to the contemporary, it soon becomes a distinctive attribute of his portraiture. Thanks to a painting that combines a nervous and dynamic brushstroke with the emphasis on mannered and sensual poses, and with the complicity of the creations of the great couturiers Worth, Doucet, Poiret and the Callot Sisters, Boldini gives life to a personal declination of the portrait of society which becomes a veritable canon, a model of style and trend that anticipates the formulas and languages of twentieth-century cinema and fashion photography.
An evocative path composed of almost one hundred and thirty works brings together splendid paintings, drawings and engravings by Boldini and colleagues Degas, Manet, Sargent, Seurat, Blanche and Helleu to wonderful period clothes, books and precious accessories. Ordered in thematic sections, each sponsored by writers who have contributed to making fashion a founding element of the poetics of modernity, from Charles Baudelaire to Oscar Wilde, from Marcel Proust to Gabriele D'Annunzio, the exhibition reveals the evocative intertwining of art and fashion and literature that have marked the fin de siècle and, evoking the frame of worldliness and refinement that was the backdrop to Boldini's long career, immerses the visitor in the refined and glittering atmospheres of the French metropolis and in all its elegant hedonism.
