Cagnaccio di San Pietro

Twenty-four years after his retrospective at the Museo Correr, Cagnaccio di San Pietro (1897-1946) comes home once more, to his Venice and to the museum in which he took the first official steps of his career.

The tribute at Ca’ Pesaro has a large and now internationally recognised sample of Magical Realism and return to classicism between the 1920s and 1930s, and deliberately links up with the exhibition on the Neue Sachlichkeit, given that, as Claudia Gian Ferrari, one of the main promoters of his revival has written, “Cagnaccio di San Pietro’s hyper-realistic vision is perhaps the closest to the linguistic schema of the German New Objectivity”.

A selection of masterpieces illustrates the thematic range of this modest, passionate artist who died prematurely at the age of 49. From the bold nude of Primo denaro (First Money) part of a “scandalous” trilogy dating from 1928, to a powerful series of portraits of men, women and children, including Portrait of Giuseppina Dalla Pasqua, never before displayed in public; from some dazzling examples of still life to religious and allegorical works like La tempesta (Storm) and La furia (Fury), which mark the start and end of his intense career, almost overlapping in theme.