Max Levai is pleased to announce Frank Auerbach: Starting Again, a comprehensive presentation of the acclaimed British-German artist in Venice, Italy. The exhibition will be on view from April 18 through June 28, 2024—coinciding with La Biennale di Venezia. Mounted at Palazzo da Mosto in Venice, the show marks a return to the city in which Auerbach won the Golden Lion at the Biennale in 1986. For the first time since that watershed presentation, work from nearly five decades of the artist’s creative production will be on display in the city. The exhibition will span two levels of the historic Palazzo da Mosto—built by architect Antonio da Ponte at the end of the 16th century, just around the corner from where he would go on to design the famed Rialto Bridge.

Uniting eleven seldom exhibited oil paintings made between 1969 and 2016, the exhibition focuses on Auerbach’s critical subjects: portraits of favored sitters and landscapes of the vistas he observes daily from his studio in London. By extension, the imagery which populates his paintings with near obsessive recursion is circumscribed to a handful of countenances of those same subjects he routinely depicts and the various sight lines just outside his studio in London. These are, however, relational worlds constructed through repeated returns—a reflection of the artist’s deep connection to his surroundings, those figures, faces, and forms he deems vital to his creative process. The exhibition unveils the expansive complexity of Auerbach’s seemingly hermetic practice, turning personal intimacy and feverish work in solitary environments into universally resonant ruminations on the human condition and the entanglement of visuality and interpersonal understanding.

To this point, Auerbach’s paintings are typically named after the depicted subject, attesting to his conception of the subject and their shifting images over the portrait process as the content of his work. These visages are encountered across the exhibition: Juliet Yardley Mills (JYM) was a contemporary he met at art school; a professional art model and close friend, JYM who sat for Auerbach twice weekly for over forty years. Another subject in the show, Paula Eyles appears in paintings from a protracted four year period, a dialogue which resulted in seismic pictorial advances for the artist. Throughout his career, Auerbach has also rendered those closest to him, including his son Jake—always portrayed in an upright position. Portraits of his beloved wife Julia, however, are invariably horizontally oriented. Sitting for Auerbach requires the understanding that paintings will be reworked, scraped down and re-layered until they are finished.

Each Auerbach painting extends a prismatic viewfinder onto a concentrated mode of making. Following from obduracy and experimentation, these attitudes wrap around his portraits (perhaps more accurately monumental, cocked heads than likenesses) and drive his architectonic landscapes (angular infrastructures that impart thick air, cloistered cities, and psycho-geographic vibration). As Auerbach confessed in a recent interview, his iterative practice is one which works, reworks, erases, and remakes—“I shall go on with that process for as long as it takes.” The agonism of painting is intonated by the finished compositions, where strident gesture lends a structural fragmentation that aligns with constant formal reconfiguration. Each line quivers with a tentative touch that conveys the ephemerality of feeling and perception, an apprehension towards totality and resolution.

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay on the artist by the Pulitzer Prize winning writer and critic Hilton Als. In this text, Als approaches Auerbach by way of the British-American poet W. H. Auden, whose own meditations on texture and landscape in and around London afford new insights into the lineages and resonances of Auerbach. Situating the painter within this poetic framework, Als enlivens the centrality of London, place, environment, and surface to the work of each. Illuminating the plausible dialogue between these two documentarians of British life, Als also attends to the crucial significance of staging an exhibition within a “vanishing city,” limning themes of impermanence and the provisional and contemplating the implications of these works in a space built of limestone, what Als calls “soft rock,” and surrounded by water. These shape-shifting dynamics come to the fore in relation to Auerbach’s fugitive imagery.

A supplementary essay on the history of Palazzo da Mosto by architect Francesco da Mosto will also be published on the occasion of the exhibition. Like Auerbach’s paintings, the Palazzo offers a metaphor of layered histories that start with the Mutis, a family of silk merchants from Bergamo who purchased a row of houses to make way for the palazzo as Venice became a trade center and crucial point of distribution with the East. After the Muti family were forced to sell the palazzo in 1669, the Acquisiti family undertook renovations, but ultimately sold the property soon after to Francesco Vezzi, who had obtained secrets to making porcelain from the Stolzen porcelain factory in Vienna. From this point forward the house changed hands several times during the 17th century until it was purchased by the Baglioni family, who specialized in the production of religious books and are responsible for the plasterwork, interior detailing, commissioned frescoes, and design that remain in the palazzo to this day.

— Megan Kincaid

Max Levai è lieto di annunciare Frank Auerbach: Starting Again, un'esposizione approfondita dell'acclamato artista britannico-tedesco a Venezia, in mostra a Palazzo da Mosto dal 18 aprile al 28 giugno 2024 in concomitanza con La Biennale d’Arte. L'esposizione rappresenta un importante ritorno a Venezia per Auerbach, che vinse il e il Leone d'Oro alla Biennale del 1986. Per la prima volta da allora, in questa storica presentazione, le opere di oltre cinque decenni di produzione creativa dell'artista saranno esposte in città. La mostra si estende su due livelli dello storico Palazzo da Mosto, costruito dall'architetto Antonio Ponte alla fine del XVI secolo, a pochi passi da dove avrebbe poi progettato il famoso Ponte di Rialto.

Unendo undici dipinti a olio raramente esposti realizzati tra il 1969 e il 2016, Starting Again si concentra sui temi tipici di Auerbach: ritratti dei suoi soggetti preferiti e i paesaggi che osserva quotidianamente dal suo studio a Londra. Gli immaginari relazionali di Auerbach sono costruiti attraverso la ripetizione, riflettendo la profonda connessione dell'artista con il suo ambiente, le figure, i volti e le forme che ritiene essenziali nel suo processo creativo.

Starting Again rivela l'ampia complessità della pratica apparentemente ermetica di Auerbach, trasformando l'intimità personale e il suo lavoro febbrile e solitario in riflessioni universalmente risonanti sulla condizione umana e sull'intreccio tra immagine e comprensione interpersonale. Ad oggi, i dipinti di Auerbach sono intitolati con il nome della persona raffigurata, attestando proprio la concezione del carattere mutevole del soggetto. Questi volti si incontrano lungo tutta la mostra: Juliet Yardley Mills (JYM) era una contemporanea incontrata alla scuola d'arte; modella professionista e grande amica dell’artista, JYM ha posato per Auerbach due volte alla settimana per oltre quarant'anni. Un altro soggetto nella mostra, Paula Eyles, appare in dipinti realizzati nell’arco di quattro anni, in un dialogo prolungato che ha portato ad avanzamenti pittorici di grande impatto nel percorso dell’artista. Nel corso della propria carriera, Auerbach ha anche ritratto i membri della sua famiglia, il figlio Jake, sempre raffigurato in posizione eretta, e la sua amata moglie Julia, ritratta invece quasi invariabilmente in posizione orizzontale.

Posare per Auerbach presume la comprensione che le sue opere verranno rielaborate, stratificando a spesso raschiando via la vernice, fino a quando non l'autore non le giudica complete. Ogni dipinto di Auerbach estende un mirino prismatico sulla concentrazione intrinseca nel suo modus operandi. Dalla sua caparbietà e sperimentazione nascono le peculiarità che guidano i suoi ritratti – forse più precisamente teste monumentali e arcuate che sembianze di persone – e i suoi paesaggi architettonici, infrastrutture angolari che imprimono aria densa, città recluse e vibrazioni psicogeografiche. In una recente intervista, Auerbach stesso rivela che la sua pratica iterativa è composta di lavoro, rielaborazione, cancellazione e rifacimento: "Continuerò con questo processo per tutto il tempo che esso richiede." L'agonismo della sua pittura si ritrova nelle opere finite, dove il gesto stridente conferisce una frammentazione strutturale che si allinea con una costante ri-configurazione compositiva. Ogni linea sembra tremare attraverso un tocco, un tentativo che trasmette la fugacità del sentimento e della percezione, l'apprensione verso la totalità e la risoluzione.

La mostra è accompagnata da un saggio sull'artista dello scrittore e critico vincitore del Premio Pulitzer Hilton Als. Nel testo, Als si avvicina ad Auerbach attraverso il poeta anglo-americano W. H. Auden, le cui meditazioni sulla texture e sul paesaggio di Londra ed i suoi dintorni offrono nuovi spunti sulle genealogie e le risonanze di Auerbach. Situando il pittore all'interno di questo quadro poetico, Als ravviva la centralità di Londra, di luogo, ambiente e superficie nel lavoro di entrambi. Oltre ad illuminare il plausibile dialogo tra questi due documentaristi della vita britannica, Als si sofferma anche sul significato cruciale dell'allestimento di una mostra in una "città che sta scomparendo", delineandone i temi di impermanenza e provvisorietà, contemplando le implicazioni di questi dipinti posizionati in uno spazio costruito di calcare, che Als chiama "roccia morbida,” e circondato dall'acqua. Queste dinamiche mutevoli trovano una corrispondenza nell’immaginario fugace di Auerbach.

Starting Again è completata da un saggio sulla storia di Palazzo da Mosto dell'architetto Francesco da Mosto, pubblicato in occasione della mostra. Similmente ai dipinti di Auerbach, il Palazzo è metafora della ‘stratificazione’ di storie stratificate ad esso associate, che iniziano con i Muti, una famiglia di mercanti di seta di Bergamo che acquistò una fila di case per fare spazio al Palazzo, al tempo in cui Venezia divenne un centro commerciale e un punto cruciale di distribuzione con l'Oriente. Dopo che la famiglia Muti fu costretta a vendere la casa nel 1669, la famiglia Acquisiti intraprese ristrutturazioni, ma fu presto costretta a vendere nuovamente la casa a Francesco Vezzi, che aveva ottenuto dalla fabbrica di porcellane Stolzen di Vienna i segreti per la produzione della porcellana di Meissen. Da questo momento in poi, il Palazzo cambiò proprietà cinque volte durante il XVII secolo, finché o non venne acquistato dalla famiglia Baglioni, specializzata nella produzione di libri religiosi, che arricchì la dimora degli stucchi, dei dettagli interni, degli affreschi e di buona parte dei mobili realizzati per il palazzo ancora oggi presenti in situ.

— Megan Kincaid

The 17th century Palazzo Muti, located amid the labyrinthine city of Venice, stands out not only because of its height, but also due to its sophisticated and inventive design. As Francesco Sansovino, son of the architect Jacopo Sansovino, wrote in his Most Noble City, Venice: “Among the most notable palaces in the world should be counted Palazzo Muti at San Cassiano, which is a stupendous and singular building, though it would appear more of a marvel had it been built along the Grand Canal.”

A group of small houses on the site, visible in the 16th century De’ Barberi map, were bought by the Muti family, silk merchants from Bergamo, with a view to constructing their great new house—themselves having come to Venice to take advantage of the new local skills in weaving silk and wool, which had developed there. To build their Palazzo, the Mutis chose Antonio da Ponte, a trusted Venetian state architect and outstanding engineer, who had designed the 316 meter long rope works (Corderie della Tana) in the Arsenale, and Venice's fortresses in Dalmatia, and who was shortly to complete the new Rialto bridge, built between 1588 and 1591.

Ever since the days of the Mutis, every family who owned the building established various activities inside it, thanks to the idea of the Palazzo as a “Fondaco”: a home and a business, all wrapped up into one. Indeed, the Palazzo was the family’s home and residence, a factory with storage spaces, commercial offices and showrooms, while also including a ballroom and official reception rooms, in line with the classic Venetian tripartite scheme.

Palazzo Muti’s exterior facades are an integration of medieval styles and the understated Classicism of Sebastiano Serlio, with one of the key elements in the Renaissance modernisation of Venice’s palazzi. Both exteriors have a similar design, but the landward facade bends like an amphitheater at the point where another diminutive street, the Calle di Ca' Muti, meets the main door. The curious wind-tunnel effect of the street below led it to be nicknamed “Calle del Vento.” The androne, or lower central hall, links the canal to the calle on one axis, and the two lateral courtyards on the other. Each courtyard had its own well to collect rainwater.

In Venice, the basis for all aspects of life was fresh water, which may indeed also become true in the future. Inside the Palazzo are two wells, one consisting of an ancient Roman column, which served as a well-head for a previous house on the site, and the other was built with the Palazzo in the Renaissance style. At the time, water would be used three times over. The first, when it was still clean and fresh, was for cooking, the second was for washing fabric or painting silk, and the last use for mixing cement mortar powder. In Venice it very quickly became clear that everything was done with a dash of “Art.” For example, the Verona marble well in the Renaissance style in the androne takes the form of an aedicule with columns, bronze fittings and wooden sculptures—possibly by the German Franz Pauc, who worked with Longhena in the library of San Giorgio Maggiore using similar motifs, theatrically positioned opposite the main staircase. Downstairs, modestly executed painted hall benches with high cut-out backs decorated with coats of arms stand against the androne walls.

The early Renaissance motif is seen also on the main staircase from the androne to the portego on the first floor, adorned with multi-coloured marbles in a geometrical pattern. The portego, in the shimmering but plain chestnut-brown floors made of the flexible Venetian marble-and-mortar compound, is lit by leaded glass windows made of small, irregular octagonal panes. The plasterwork on the walls owes to a later period, dating to the 18th century, as is much of the Palazzo's furniture.

As in most other cases in the history of these huge houses at the hub of Venice’s trading empire, the Mutis did not remain its proprietors for long. In 1669 they sold the house to the Acquisti family, documented by the 1686 engraving by Coronelli. But, only 30 years later, the Acquistis themselves had to sell the house to Francesco Vezzi, who had obtained from the Stolzen porcelain factory in Vienna the secrets of making Meissen porcelain, and by 1720 he was making satirical and burlesque figures in Venice on Oriental models. In 1737, a fire spread from a nearby house during a wedding party, causing 31,000 ducats worth of damage to Palazzo Muti, and after a period during which it was rented to various European royals, the Vezzi, in turn, had to sell, and it came into the possession of the Baglioni family. The Baglionis, from Lombardy, built up interests in printing, another of the city’s traditional businesses. Under a special license from the Patriarch of Venice, they specialized in the production of religious books and bookselling.

The decorations commissioned by the Baglionis were prompted by their children’s weddings. Various artists were employed for the decoration of different rooms, elaborately adorned with stucco-work, frescoes, and gilding. An allegory of good and evil in marriage, the groom with his hands chained and four overdoor figures representing two feminine virtues and two vices, are by Jacopo Guarana, who the year before worked on paintings in Ca' Rezzonico. In the small dining room, too, the ceiling is decorated with mythological scenes by Guarana, which continue the theme of marital dangers. Then there is an immense mirror filling the space on the rear wall between two windows, and another ceiling fresco, The Triumph of Art by Francesco Zugno, Tiepolo's most able pupil. This shows Apollo protecting the arts against the threats of time with figures of Diligence, Intellect, Drawing and Invention in each corner.

In the other wing of the house, the artist chosen was one of the most prestigious in Venice: Giambattista Crosato. Here, Juno presides over her heavenly domain in an allusion to the well-ordered domestic life of the Baglionis at their residence in the country at Massanzago, where the Venetian dramatist Carlo Goldoni, a family friend, was known to have worked. The theme is repeated in the frescoed walls of the large dining room, where the pleasures of their villa garden were depicted by David Rossi, and where flickering candlelight makes the architectural images three-dimensional.

The chapel, and the adjoining miniature boudoir, are located at the end of the south-west sequence of rooms on the first floor (piano nobile). f The fact that it has its own roof suggests it was part of the original concept. Its position leaves a four-story lacuna at the end of the facade above street level: a channel to the Divine unobstructed by profanities with a putto on the chapel ceilings.

Palazzo Muti remained in the Baglioni family until 1919, when it was sold to the historian Andrea Da Mosto. The Da Mosto family has played a prominent part in the affairs of the Republic of Venice and its subsequent history for the last thousand years. They acquired an estate at Torre di Mosto, near Jesolo, but remained in the city at Ca' Da Mosto, a Byzantine house still standing in the parish of Santi Apostoli along the Grand Canal.

Political, judicial, and naval responsibilities in Venice were inseparable from mercantile duties, which perhaps explains the success of one of the Venetian Empire's heroes: Alvise Da Mosto (1433-88). In 1454, he obtained the support of the King of Portugal’s son, Prince Henry the Navigator, for a voyage down the west coast of Africa. Two years later, in 1456, he undertook a second voyage, during which he discovered the Cape Verde islands by chance. He wrote detailed accounts of the peoples of Gambia and Senegal, and of the gold trade, and these long remained in print in Venice. The story of this patrician Venetian family almost came to an end with Napoleon, since, of all the twenty children living at that time, only one line bore fruit. It was the present owner's grandfather, a high-ranking official in the Austro-Hungarian empire, who rediscovered his Venetian heritage, and returned to the city.

His son, Andrea Da Mosto (1868-1960), was director of the State Archive, and in 1940 he compiled its first catalog and index, consisting of more than 50 kilometers of documents, still used today, as well as published a history of the Doges of Venice. After buying Palazzo Muti, he introduced the Da Mosto history by filling the empty frames in the portego with copies of family pictures, including a map of Alvise Da Mosto's voyages, copied from the version by Grisellini in the Doge's Palace. In recent decades the house has fascinated filmmakers, including Luchino Visconti, who filmed Senso here, and Joseph Losey, who used it in Eva. It also appeared in The Talented Mr. Ripley by Anthony Mingella.

In addition to continuing to maintain an important historic building, the current owner, Ranieri Da Mosto, and his wife, Maria Grazia, have undertaken the refurnishing of its main spaces, using historic and family pictures and other contents appropriate to the various periods. The new scheme not only includes the piano nobile but also the attic, which has astonishing views over Venice's skyline. Indeed, the attic has been transformed in a manner akin to French artists’ studios. Notably, it was there that the painter Tancredi Parmeggiani announced the first sale of one of his paintings to Peggy Guggenheim. So the Venetian Palazzo as a Fondaco meant work, business, and art and, from the mid-15th century, art became the most important of these three elements.

On May 29, May, 1453, Sultan Mehmet II’s army of Turks marched into Constantinople, and took the city. Venice had lost her most important Imperial outpost. Now the Islamic Ottoman Empire dominated the East. This aggressor posed the greatest threat to Venice’s very existence. Venice did everything possible to make friends with the Turks. But rather than send a politician to Constantinople, they sent an artist: Gentile Bellini. As an ambassador and diplomatic representative of Venice, Bellini painted the portrait of Sultan Mehmet II. Venice was always a place synonymous with politics and money, but now Art was becoming as important to the city as its power and wealth.

As Gentile Bellini was on his diplomatic mission to Constantinople, his brother painted the Venetian leader Doge Leonardo Loredan, the man who had brokered the peace mission to the Ottomans.These two portraits tell a fascinating story: the Sultan was Muslim, and the Doge was a Christian. By rights, they should have been enemies, as the Pope himself wished, but business has always been more important than religion to the Venetians, and trade flourished. Here you can still see a mixture of science and art, and I think it is fantastic that Venice is still one of the world's major meeting points of Art, all these centuries later, connecting past and present.