Drawing the city, The Albertina Academy and Turin between eclecticism and Art Nouveau is the title of a successful exhibition at the Pinacoteca Albertina, inaugurated in October 2021, the first part of a multi-year project dedicated to the enhancement and knowledge of the historical heritage preserved in the Archives of the Albertina Academy.
The exhibition highlights the excellence of our collections and focuses on the design of the city in the era of greatest architectural and decorative innovation in Turin, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the era of Liberty and decorative eclecticism. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Albertina Academy was a hotbed of training and research that helped define the new image of Turin in the process of transformation from a capital city to an industrial city. The aim of the project is to shed light on this story, and what was around it, through a journey made of precious and fascinating decorative projects, usually inaccessible to the public.
Eclecticism is the main style of the time investigated by the project. Its cultural matrices allow a new freedom to the designer, open to wide repertoires, which range in history and places. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in conjunction with the eclectic approach, Liberty spreads which, starting from the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art of 1902, finds fertile ground for experimentation in the Albertina. In Turin, the planning of the second half of the nineteenth century is an example of experimentation with a new urban image, a synthesis of decorum and quality of public space. Now on display are twenty wonderful watercolours by Giulio Casanova (1875 – 1961), a professor of Decoration who with great mastery conceived and painted the artistic elements of his extraordinary projects: from the Caffè Baratti & Milano in Piazza Castello in Turin to the volume dedicated to the Royal Train conceived in preparation for the marriage between Umberto of Savoy and Maria José of Belgium and still today at the service of the Presidency of the Republic.
Alongside the historical works there are contemporary creations