January 27th marks Remembrance Day: to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, many Italian museums have joined the Holocaust art initiative, organized by ECAD – Jewish Culture & Dramatic Arts, with the support of MiBACT. The Art Museum in Palazzo Gavotti is among the participants in a group that today consists of 32 cultural institutions, a good number of which are in Liguria. The objective of the event: to expose and highlight the works related to the Holocaust, for example, the authors that were affected by the laws of racial or political persecution or historically belonging to one of the art movements pioneered by the Nazis as “Degenerate Art”.
At the Art Museum in Palazzo Gavotti two free openings on the 27th and 31st of January are scheduled and there will be a focus on some of the works of great strength and beauty.
From the Ceramics Museum, the large Vase decorated with a parade of characters in costume, created by Emanuele Luzzati, the great artist and stage designer born in Genoa from a Jewish family, which in 1940 because of racial laws, was forced to abandon his city, where he could return only in 1947 at the end of the war.
In the Pinacoteca Civica Ulivi is exhibited, created by Carlo Levi, Italian writer and painter among the most significant of the twentieth century, represented here by a work characterized by vigorous pictorial language, recognizable for its sober realism and crude brush strokes.
In the Milani/Cardazzo Collection, all attention is drawn towards La Jumelle, work of art created in 1939 by Man Ray, one of the leading interpreters of Dadaism and Surrealism, movements that alongside Expressionism and Vanguards were banned by “Degenerate Art”in 1933, with the rise to power of the National Socialist Party in Germany.
In Savona, the Sandro Pertini and Renata Cuneo Museum are part of the Holocaust art circuit, as witnesses of the life and love for art of Sandro Pertini, one of the greatest exponents of Anti-Facism and of the Resistance, a protagonist of events that led to the liberation from fascism.
From Friuli to Sicily, the other museums that have joined to date will soon be available online.