Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Milan, February 6 2020 – The great exhibition dedicated to Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) opens tomorrow at Palazzo Reale in Milan.

(Re)discovered by the historical-artistic criticism of the twentieth century, La Tour was an artist of light, and his work earned him, among other things, the title of "French Caravaggio". But his originality in the representation of reality between light and shadow is in fact the fruit of an absolutely original study and a coherent production, which today, for the first time in Italy, is presented to the public in an evocative setting.

The meeting between Milan and Georges de La Tour had already taken place in 2011, when they were exhibited with great success in Palazzo Marino, in the now traditional Christmas exhibition, two of his works "The Adoration of the Shepherds" and "St. Joseph the Carpenter". Now, for the first time in Italy, Palazzo Reale hosts a retrospective dedicated to the most famous French painter of the seventeenth century and his relationships with the great masters of his time.

“Georges de La Tour. The Europe of light”, at Palazzo Reale from 7 February to 7 June 2020, is promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan | Culture, Palazzo Reale and MondoMostre Skira, is curated by Francesca Cappelletti and boasts a committee scientific composed of Pierre Rosenberg (former director of the Louvre), Gail Feigenbaum (director, Getty Research Institute), Annick Lemoine (director, Musée Cognacq-Jay), Andres Ubeda (deputy director, Prado Museum).

An exhibition project made possible by the network of collaborations between Palazzo Reale and 28 international institutions, such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Frick Collection in New York, the S. Francisco Fine Art Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Norfolk, the National Art Gallery of Lviv, plus a large participation of French regional museum institutions, such as the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nantes, the Musée du Mont-du Piété of Bergues, the Musée départemental of 'Art ancien et contemporain of Epinal, the Museée des Beaux-Arts of Dijon, the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec of Albi, the Musée départemental Georges de La Tour of Vic-sur-Seille, and some important Italian museums such as the Uffizi Gallery, the Vatican Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Ancient Art-Palazzo Barberini.

A unique exhibition considering that no work by La Tour is preserved in Italy and there are around 40 works certainly attributed to the artist, of which 15 are on display in the exhibition (plus one attributed).

Despite the aura of mystery that surrounds the artist and his work, for decades now Georges de La Tour has been one of the favorite painters of the French, and not only. He is an enigmatic artist, who portrays angels taken from the people, saints without halos or iconographic attributes, and who prefers subjects taken from the street, such as beggars, generally painting low-ranking people rather than historical models or high-ranking figures. The few paintings recognized as autographs are mostly small or medium format, intimate, without a landscape background, nocturnal; and, especially in the presumed last artistic phase, almost monochromes with a geometric layout, simple but very modern for the time. However, traces of him, and those of his work, were lost throughout the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, also due to the wars for independence that devastated his native land. His work was rediscovered and cataloged by twentieth-century critics.

The exhibition is accompanied by the important catalog published by Skira with essays by Francesca Cappelletti, Pierre Rosenberg, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Gail Feigenbaum, Dimitri Salmon, Gianni Papi, Rossella Vodret with Giorgio Leone, Matteo Mancinelli, Manfredi Merluzzi, including the data sheets of very in-depth works from a critical and bibliographical point of view and the related images and followed by an extensive bibliography.