Word: fabbri
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...never set foot in Florence. but a significant body of his work - at least 50 of his bold and colorful paintings - made their way to the city in the dying years of the 1800s and the stirrings of the new century. The story of how two American collectors, Egisto Fabbri and Charles Loeser, introduced the Post-Impressionist's art to Italy, and how it influenced painters there, "could have been a film," says 19th century art scholar Francesca Bardazzi. That movie would tell "the fascinating story of two American collectors - rich, handsome, young, the first collectors of Cézanne...
...evident at the exhibition she has curated, "Cézanne in Florence," at the city's Palazzo Strozzi Foundation until July 29. The 16th century palace has been painstakingly restored and this, the first show since its reopening, attempts a similarly careful reconstruction of the cultural life that Fabbri and Loeser found when they bought their substantial villas in the city. Florence was one of the key stops on the European Grand Tour undertaken by many wealthy and cultured Americans of the time, and the young men moved in expatriate circles that included well-known cultural figures. Writers and modern...
These expats were keen to soak up the local culture, but unlike most Florentines, their interests extended beyond city and national boundaries. Fabbri and Loeser became clients of Ambroise Vollard, the foremost art dealer of the time, based in Paris, and one of the few contemporary champions of Cézanne. The painter, who would be recognized after his death as one of the fathers of modern painting, the direct inspiration for Cubism and Fauvism, spent his twilight years living in isolation in Aix-en-Provence, France, scorned by critics and ignored by the public. Outside attention, when it came...
Such rebuffs did not cool the Americans' ardor for Cézanne's work, and by 1913 they had between them amassed the largest collection of Cézannes outside Russia (several of Vollard's best clients were Russian industrialists). Neither man's collection would remain intact. Fabbri plowed much of his fortune into building a Romanesque church in an earthquake-ravaged town. By 1928, he had to sell 13 Cézannes to finance a property deal. In the same year, Loeser died, leaving eight paintings to the White House...
...Palazzo Strozzi has been able to reassemble only about one-third of their original holdings, and yet even this remnant seems almost too rich for the blood. Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (ca. 1877), from Fabbri's collection, still has the power to stun that it exercised on the poet Rainer Maria Rilke at the Paris Salon in 1907. "The knowledge of its existence has transformed into an elation that I feel even in my sleep," Rilke wrote to his wife. The subject of the painting is Hortense Fiquet, Cézanne's model...