Single Property

untitled
12 June 2012
Total sold € 801.908 Percentage of lot sold 67,6 % Percentage of lot sold by value 119,8 %
CONTACTS
Guido Wannenes
Chiara Guiducci
Tel. +39 010 2530097 Fax +39 010 2517767

THE ORLANDI COLLECTION

According to ‘Pino’ Orlandi Sicily was the “golden Isle”, as he once described it in a little poetic composition he wrote in 1952 that was published in the cultural travel magazine “Italia – Svizzera”. In two elegant magazine columns, culture, art and sport were closely inter-connected and passionately debated. They were shared with a wider public and set out to be educative. In that short little composition the writer evoked the legendary Nuvolari and the Targa Florio, two names that Orlandi had brought back to their ancient splendours: «Today modern Nuvolari are only athletes, formidable athletes but only athletes since the island has come much closer – both in terms of space and activity – to the lagoon that has rocked our childhood dreams in a fairy-tale atmosphere like at Monreale di Pergusa di Taormina». This was a falling in love with fertile Trinacria (Sicily) that had blossomed in the Second World War (in 1943 to be precise, shortly before the first Allied landing at Gela on 10th July), when as a young airforce officer from the Veneto (he was born in Este in the Province of Padua on 20th February 1920), he was assigned to the airport of that particular city that was fundamental for the outcome of the war. This was a sentiment that was fortified throughout sixty years on the island where young Orlandi’s open and extrovert character – he was one of the most important figures in the Christian Democratic political movement that supported economic and social development in the South of Italy – helped him rise to increasingly prestigious political positions from 1945 onwards when he was able to make his own personal contribution to the political life of the island as well as support culture, entertainment and art in Sicily. For decades after 1949, as the Director of Tourism he had the opportunity to meet some of the most interesting characters on the literary and artistic scene who would help him in many of his cultural initiatives. The culmination of his project to relaunch cultural life on the island came in 1953 with the sertting up of the magazine “Sicilia” which started off as a means to promote tourism as was mentioned in 1966 by Leonardo Sciascia on the occasion of the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary: « thanks to the layout, the merry assortment of rare and ancient Sicilian iconographical material along with the most modern expressions of figurative art and the superb quality of the photography, “Sicilia” has achieved a significant cultural role and remains, in this sense, one of the most valid undertakings in Sicilian publishing». Pino Orlandi was also a multifaceted and inquisitive collector, a logical consequence of a character that drove his curiosity about all forms of creativity with passion. He had assiduous and fruitful contacts with artists both on a level of personal friendship and on a level of actual creative contribution. Let’s just remember some of the most famous: Giorgio De Chirico, Ottone Rosai, Renato Guttuso, Domenico Cantatore, Orfeo Tamburi, Giovanni Omiccioli and Corrado Cagli. In the coming auction on June 12th, three years or so after his death, a part of Giuseppe Orlandi’s modern collection will be sold. Among works worthy of particular attention is a splendid Piazza d’Italia by Giorgio De Chirico from 1957, silent with its Vitruvius-like architecture, with a chimney reaching up upon the clearest of horizons alongside a temple-like station where a clock measuring the hours of “lost ideas” may be seen. A further work from the ‘Pictor Optimus’, a Venezia, Palazzo Ducale, from 1956, is a paradigmatic example of the artist’s Baroque period, followed by a year later a Fleeing Horse-rider – almost Rubens-like in his pose. A pencil drawing from the same period with the evocative title Trinacria, takes us back to the climate of a Sicily immersed in classical myths. By Renato Guttuso there is a Stromboli from 1953 where the artist’s vital and impassioned colours are exalted by the scintillating beauty and heart-wrenching poetry of his homeland, Sicily, that had so charmed the young Pino Orlandi at the beginning of the 1940’s
untitled
12 June 2012
Total sold € 801.908 Percentage of lot sold 67,6 % Percentage of lot sold by value 119,8 %
CONTACTS
Guido Wannenes
Chiara Guiducci
Tel. +39 010 2530097 Fax +39 010 2517767

Villa Carrega Cataldi
Via Albaro 11 | 16145
Tel. +39 010 2530097
Fax +39 010 2517767
Via F. P. de Calboli, 6 | 00195
Tel. +39 06 69200565
Fax +39 06 69208044
Palazzo Recalcati
Via Amedei 8 | 20123
Tel. +39 02 72023790
Fax +39 02 89015908
6, avenue Saint Michel | 98000
Tel. +377 99 90 46 26
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