Braque vis-à-vis. Picasso, Matisse e Duchamp continues the exhibition focus on 20th-century art at Palazzo della Ragione, presenting approximately 150 works dating mainly from the period between the two wars and immediately after WWII.

Thanks to a substantial body of works, along with artists’ books and ceramics from the Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso in Münster, the exhibition explores Braque’s often overlooked influence on French art of the 1960s and 1970s.

The visitor route also benefits from gouaches owned by the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Belfort, a wool/cotton tapestry from the Cité international de la tapisserie in Aubusson and oils from European institutions including the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and the Museo del Novecento in Milan. Also on display are works by Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Léger and Delaunay-Terk.

The exhibition beings a renewed focus to Braque’s mature and late production, marked by the emergence of an ideographic and pictographic orientation by which, in Braque’s vision, the figurative arts and poetry acquired common morphological traits. In those years, he relentlessly reproduced a small set of motifs, a fantastic alphabet comprising just a few lemmas (birds, chariots, two lovers, fishes, vases…), replicated and perfected in his quest for ultimate and absolute simplicity.

The essays in the Electa catalogue, by Michele Dantini and Markus Müller (together with the first Italian translation of a celebrated essay on Braque by the great British art historian Michael Baxandall and a rich anthology of other texts published in Italian for the first time), reconstruct the relationships between Braque and other artists – those of his own generation as too ones of the younger generation, including Duchamp.

Lastly, for the exhibition, the artist Flavio Favelli has reinterpreted the mysterious paper sculpture Braque installed in his studio in February 1914, photographed at the time but subsequently destroyed.