Venice, at Palazzo Grimani the photos of Inge Morath dedicated to the lagoon city
For the first time in Italy, the photographs of Inge Morath dedicated to Venice are exhibited. It happens, on the centenary of the birth of the Austrian photographer, at the Palazzo Grimani Museum in Venice, from 18 January to 4 June 2023.
It’s a Inge Morath unpublished the one that the Grimani Palace Museum Of Venice show to the public from January 18 to June 4, 2023 in the exhibition entitled Inge Morath. Photographing from Venice onwards, curated by Kurt Kaidl and Brigitte Blüml, with Valeria Finocchi, and promoted by the Veneto Regional Museums Directorate and by the Suazes company which, a few years ago, made the career of this photographer known in detail in Italy. In fact, the review explores the figure of the Austrian photographer Inge Morath (Graz, 1923 – New York, 2022) in centenary of birth with a unpublished section for Italy dedicated precisely to Venice, where his career began. It was love that led Inge Morath and Lionel Burch, newly weds, to Venice in November 1951. And it was the bad weather in the Lagoon and Robert Capa, who was not directly familiar with photography but who already collaborated with the famous Parisian photographic agency, who made her the first female photographer of the Magnum Photos Agency.
The exhibition focuses on Inge Morath’s Venice, through the famous reportage that the photographer made in the Lagoon, when theMagnum agency he sent it to the city on behalf of L’Oeil, an art magazine that had chosen to accompany a report by the legendary Mary McCarthy with Venetian glimpses.
At the time of her first stay in Venice, Morath worked for Magnum not as a photographer but as an editorial assistant. In practice she took care, also thanks to her knowledge of languages, of the creation of the captions that accompanied the images of her photographer colleagues, of the caliber of Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and Robert Capa.
She didn’t take pictures, but she didn’t lack eye and sensitivity. In that November, the light of Venice in the rain bewitched her, so as to induce her to call Roberto Capa, manager of Magnum, to suggest that he send a photographer capable of capturing the magic that was so amazing her. Capa replied that a Magnum photographer in Venice was already there: it was her with the camera. All that was left was to buy a roll of film, load it and start photographing. “I was all excited,” Inge Morath would later say. “I went to the place where I wanted to take my photographs and stopped: a street corner where people passed in a way that seemed interesting to me. I adjusted the camera and pressed the shutter button as soon as I saw that everything was exactly as I wanted. It was like a revelation. Instantly realizing something that had been inside me for so long, capturing it the moment it took the shape I felt was right. After that, there was no stopping me.”
In 1955, four years after those first photographs, the assignment from the magazine arrives L’Oeil. Once in Venice, she felt the urge to explore the city and so “for hours I wandered aimlessly, just looking, obsessed by the pure joy of seeing and discovering a place. Obviously I had devoured books about Venice, about painting and what I was supposed to do. My brain was full of them…”.
“My greatest amusement was sitting at the Scuola degli Schiavoni and immersing myself in the works of Carpaccio, almost always alone. Or spending time in the company of Tiepolo, it was the end of the world. In the evening my feet were tired and even in my sleep I still found myself walking on countless bridges, the waves of the canals as if petrified”.
The exhibition as a whole collects about 200 photographs which will have a specific and unpublished focus on Venice also with the support of unpublished documentation. Many of these Venetian photographs, about eighty, have never been exhibited before in Italy. A selection of his main photographic reports dedicated to Spain, Iran, France, England-Ireland, United States of America, China and Russia , as well as the section dedicated to portraits, a very important section in his last part of his career.
As he declares Daniel Ferrara, regional director of Veneto Museums: “The report of the Palazzo Grimani Museum, State Institute of the Veneto Regional Museum Directorate – Ministry of Culture, continues with high expressions of contemporary creativity The concept is that of a laboratory museum, which inherits that function of melting pot of artistic experiences carried out by the Palazzo between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Subsequently ad Archintoshow specific site by the German master Georg Baselitz with works in dialogue with the space of the Palazzo and his collection, the museum welcomed the exhibition of important Italian cartoon artists, After the end. Narrative architectures and new humanity. Now the Museum is turning its gaze to photography and it is a choice that also springs from the joint commitment of the Veneto Museum Directorate and the Central Institute for Cataloging and Documentation for the study, protection and enhancement of the photographic heritage”.
Concepts that are confirmed by Valeria Finocchi, director of the Palazzo Grimani Museum: “For some years now, the Museum has been the subject of an important enhancement process thanks to the active public-private collaboration with prestigious entities such as the Venetian Heritage Foundation and the incessant work of building new contents and new perspectives of reading its precious artistic and architectural heritage, which engage the internal staff and collaborators from historical-museum research to the planning of high-profile and educational experiences. Through the rearrangement of numerous rooms on the noble floor, including the famous Tribuna, in 2019, and the Sala del Doge, in 2021, the Palazzo has returned to the center of the Venetian cultural scene and today addresses different audiences, in a renewed with the city itself thanks to projects dedicated to the recovery of the intangible heritage of the reference area”.
Marco Minuz di Suazes as co-organizer of the exhibition project, states: “This collaboration with the Veneto museum management and with the Palazzo Grimani museum enhances a work we have undertaken a few years ago to make our country discover the figure of this extraordinary figure. Reconstructing a project based on the work that Inge Morath dedicated to this city is the best way to celebrate his birth”.
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday from 10.00 to 19.00; last entry at 18.30. Monday closed. For information: https://ingemorathexhibition.com
Image: Inge Morath, Venice, 1955 ©Fotohof archive / Inge Morath / Magnum Photos
Information about the exhibition
Venice, at Palazzo Grimani the photos of Inge Morath dedicated to the lagoon city |
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