Versione Italiana

Press release, February 2007

On the occasion of the large exhibition dedicated to Cézanne in Palazzo Strozzi, the MNAF organizes a photographic exhibition to contextualize the cultural, artistic and economic ambience of Florence in the years when Cézanne's works were in the city. The curators Carlo Sisi and Silvestra Bietoletti have drawn from the fund of extraordinary photographs in the Alinari Museum and Archives.

Florence played a prominent role in the story of the 'artistic fortunes' of Paul Cézanne, thanks to the far-sightedness of two young American-born collectors, Egisto Paolo Fabbri and Charles Alexander Loeser. In the nineteenth and twentieth century they bought 48 of his finest works for their Florentine residence, contributing considerably to the affirmation of an experimental and solitary genius, on the whole ignored at the time by the critics.

The exhibition proposes an insight into that particular and intense intellectual period in which Florence was one of the liveliest capitals of international culture. The photographs of the Alinari, numbered among the leading protagonists of that culture, document the outstanding figures, places and works that made Florence one of the most dynamic cities for cultural exchanges and transformation at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The themes include the literary cafés and avant-garde performances of the early twentieth century, the bourgeois architecture and the forming of the great collections of art, the foreign intellectual figures as well as those that represented the spirit of a strictly genuine Florentine tradition. There is nothing that can contextualize and perhaps make it easier to understand the great adventure of Cézanne in Florence as well as the photographs of that period..

Catalogue Alinari

MNAF : Florence, Piazza S. M. Novella 14a r, 055.216310, fax 055.2646990, mnaf@alinari.it
Open : 9:30 a.m. - 7:30 p.m. ; Saturdays till 11:30 p.m. , closed Wednesdays.
Tickets : Full price € 9; Reduced € 7.50; Special agreements € 6; Schools € 4;
Children under 5 are free (The ticket includes admission to the Museum)

Press Office : Alinari - Rosa Manno, tel. 055.2395207, fax 055.2395230, rosa@alinari.it
Fratelli Alinari Fondazione per la Storia della Fotografia : Largo Alinari 15, Florence, 055.23951,
fax 055.2382857 info@alinarifondazione.it , www.alinarifondazione.it