Room 1

The first room of the exhibition summarizes the various themes that structure the journey, with the sole exception of painted faces and figures set upon a boundary, all of which are found in the subsequent rooms.
Anselm Kiefer, in the most immediate contemporary context, represents the continuous interplay of opposites — most fundamentally between light and darkness, and between sky and earth — giving rise to that horizon line that projects itself toward an unknown boundary. Mark Rothko, meanwhile, evokes a different horizon: an almost imperceptible night that intercepts and plunges into the elusive boundary of interiority.
Gustave Courbet and Claude Monet depict in their canvases the vast expanse between sea and sky, that boundary, dense with matter or dissolving into vapor, which testifies to a gaze cast toward infinity, with a new sense of time that Monet would bring to perfection. Paul Cezanne, on the other hand, here announces that “elsewhere” — in this case Provence — which is a boundary far from the cities. A boundary that Gauguin would later push much further.

Room 2

Boundaries can also be those, vast and intricately layered, of one’s own inner self — which is why self-portraits hold such importance in this exhibition. But boundaries are also those traced upon a face that conveys the daily instinct of intimate measure. In the first case, self-portraits from Van Gogh to Gauguin and beyond; in the second, faces and gazes from Courbet to Manet.
The many self-portraits painted by Munch map an interior of thought that itself becomes a boundary, evoking that same immensity within him that rivals the endless latitudes of the North. Vincent van Gogh is the painter who, alongside Rembrandt, more than any other sought in his own face the absolute, the ultimate boundary. Of the 35 self-portraits we know today — while many others he surely erased — most were painted during the two years he spent in Paris, especially in 1887. The one in this room, now arriving in Europe for only the second time, belongs to that luminous season.
Yet the inner boundary can also turn into an aura of the everyday, veiled in silence — there, where the domestic presence of the face emerges, even when painted by a steadfast realist like Courbet.

Room 3

In the heart of the twentieth century, there are two artists who have often been paired together in museum narratives. Their names — Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon — are an immediate synonym for that tension which makes of the face, scorched and battered, almost seared by the subterranean forces coursing through it, the most visible sign of the inner boundary in modern man.
For this reason, this room is dedicated to them. Yet here, almost as a hinge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we also encounter a woman’s face painted by Amedeo Modigliani in the final, turbulent phase of his life. Eyes isolated within their own distant world. The painter himself once wrote: “With one you look at the world, and with the other you look inside yourself.” Precisely the essence of the inner boundary that this exhibition seeks to reveal.

Sala 4

To become part of the nature one contemplates — this is the idea above all others that engaged all the great American painters of the nineteenth century, and some of the greatest of the century that followed. It is from this idea that this new section of the exhibition takes its start. Nature that envelops both body and soul, fusing them intimately together.
The journey into this eternal, primordial nature gave rise to a beauty in painting that in Europe is still not widely known, and which therefore reveals itself with the freshness of innocence, always bound to the presence of the divine within what remained the Garden of Eden. These were the marvellous years of the Hudson River School, the school of American Realism in the mid-nineteenth century, with its various artists embodying different sensibilities and visions — among them those gathered in this room.

Room 5

In this room, the relationship between figures and the vast expanses of nature, in American painting, reaches its height with several extraordinary artists of the twentieth century. The figures themselves become almost like boundary markers, points where the threshold fixes itself before dissolving into the immensity.
Winslow Homer is the most extraordinary painter of nature and figures that America possessed between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the canvas in this room demonstrates it perfectly: a space that is at once eternity and a single afternoon in America before the ocean. This dialogue between the intimacy of the figure and the infinity of space is the same that Hopper would evoke some decades later, for a journey into interiority that has few equals. Then come two painters: Richard Diebenkorn and Andrew Wyeth. The first, fascinated by Matisse and Bonnard, chose the window as the place from which to lean out or to look, onto the boundary of space. The second perhaps more than any other in America embodies the seeker of boundaries, between the garden and the limitless expanse of space — precisely the meaning of this exhibition.  

Room 6

In Europe, it is Matisse who works on the theme of the window, the one who brings into the interior of a room the boundary of the Mediterranean in Nice. Arnold Böcklin, instead, moved upon the terrain of an idealist art, a characteristic tendency of German-speaking nations in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, creating a solemn suspension in dialogue with the perishability of human destiny. Giovanni Segantini places his figures beneath the high Swiss mountains, at the time of his move to the Grisons. A boundary both intimate and immeasurable, in the warmth of a mother’s embrace.
The second part of the room is a monographic area dedicated to Paul Gauguin. Contained here, with four famous canvases, is perhaps the most immediate sense of what the word “boundary” means, a word destined to turn plural. Gauguin, the painter who more than any other pursued his own limits by venturing ever farther away, ever more bound to the idea of a world that no longer represented him, and thus sought each day an alternative space, to give voice to dreams and to color. First it was Martinique, where he spent several months in the latter half of 1887, arriving from Panama. Then Brittany became the region of an “elsewhere” almost domestic, yet still far from the poisons of Paris. Finally, the two Tahitian periods — between 1891 and 1893, and again between 1895 and 1901 — which sealed the birth of that exotic boundary which, however, would in the end disappoint the painter.

Sala 7

Gauguin went far in search of his boundary, but many other painters chose a land — and a coastline — much closer to Paris as their place of escape, a boundary where the joy of color was complete. In this sense, Provence and the Mediterranean coast became fragrance and perfume, the idea of a Tahiti close at hand, a boundary that could almost be touched.
The Mediterranean coast, then, and its immediate Provençal hinterland: places in which the glory of the new French landscape was celebrated. Within just a few dozen kilometers, in the early months of 1888 — even simultaneously — extraordinary artists such as Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, and Vincent van Gogh were at work, between Antibes, Aix-en-Provence, and Arles. Following them came Pierre Bonnard in the early twentieth century, in the area of Le Cannet.
There is also something quite out of the ordinary: when the search for boundaries does not take artists into the realm of the faraway, but rather when those boundaries themselves become proximity, nearness, intimacy of images otherwise distant. The great French painters discovered in the Japanese ukiyo-e masters — from Utamaro to Hokusai to Hiroshige — a clarity and an intensity of light that they then found in Provence and along the Mediterranean coast. Equally fundamental, through that sense of graphic line always derived from the Japanese, was the pursuit of the essential through powerful simplification.

Room 8

If we speak of natural boundaries, the century that more than any other gave them form was the nineteenth. For this reason, in this exhibition, now that the time has come to narrate and describe them, nineteenth-century artists stand in the foreground — together with a few others of the twentieth century who carried their legacy forward in the most moving of ways.
The nineteenth century is thus the century of nature. The time when man increasingly sought a relationship with the wondrous spaces of skies and forests, seas and mountains, paths and lakes, fields and gardens, winds and stars. A time when artists, following the thread that bound them to landscape, painted with constancy a new relationship with the world.
Caspar David Friedrich signaled the dimension of the Romantic infinite in a sublime way through his visions of mountains, while painters of the American Hudson River School took his example as their point of departure, blending Romanticism and Realism in depictions of both the mountains of the East and those of the West. Yet it is clear that the sacred mountain of the entire history of art is Cezanne’s Sainte-Victoire, painted by him dozens of times up until 1906, the year of his death. A flat surface, one that refuses any suggestion of perspectival depth, rejecting traditional conventions.

Rooms 9 – 10

In this room — and in the smaller one that follows, already anticipated here — a sense of wonder and astonishment seizes us, within the warm light of sunsets over the sea. From Turner’s Romantic vision to Courbet’s realism, and on to the seas of Monet in the 1880s in Normandy, already far removed from Impressionism. Then, further still, to the twentieth-century derivations of Bonnard, Nolde, and De Staël. In the sequence of natural elements that inscribe boundaries in space, the sea holds an importance even greater than the mountain, and precedes the sky, which seems to embrace all within itself.
The theme of the sea fascinated Turner, in its washed-out dispersal, just as it did Courbet, the foremost exponent of realist painting in Europe around the mid-nineteenth century. We see it here, in the canvas in this room and the two in the next, all of them bound to the relationship between human history and eternity.
If Monet, with the seas he painted in Normandy, definitively broke with the religion of pure plein air, then Bonnard, Nolde, and above all De Staël, starting from the given of optical vision, allowed that same vision to sink and transform into the territories of interiority. Color — from Bonnard’s yellow to De Staël’s orange — becomes a true fact of the spirit.

Room 11

In this room, with two paintings by Turner and one by Church, the section devoted to the boundary of the sea comes to a close, and the final, expansive section opens — dedicated to the boundaries of the sky, that space which embraces everything, as in a cosmogony. Many of Turner’s paintings reveal a precise awareness of the possibility of narrating History itself through the supremacy of light. He does not paint shipwrecks and storms as so many eighteenth-century painters did; instead, he engages in a true hand-to-hand struggle with the elements. From him, Church too would draw the luminous sense of a shipwreck already past.
The second part of the room opens the extraordinary final chapter of the exhibition — the one devoted to the sky as the sign of the most vast boundary. And it does so by returning to the Romantic era, with works by Friedrich and Constable. In Friedrich, the sky becomes everything: the expression of the sacred, the place where the divine dwells, often under the sign of the moon’s dominion. In his painted skies occurs the meeting of light, color, matter, and spirit.
John Constable invented another kind of Romanticism, distant even from that of his compatriot Turner — the Romanticism of brief, daily measure, where the sky is born from the variability of light, as in the series painted between 1821 and 1822, one of which can be seen in the next room. Works that are at once deeply poetic notations and descriptions of precise atmospheric conditions.

Room 12

It was on the beaches around Honfleur, his native town, that Eugène Boudin began to walk alone, rising very early in the morning to capture the movement of the clouds and translate it onto his small sheets of paper. The sky as a boundary — so different from Romantic heroism — and instead the sky as a daily boundary, one that the Impressionists would later bring to perfection.
It was in Honfleur itself that Baudelaire discovered Boudin’s work: “I recently saw in Boudin’s studio several hundred pastel studies made before the sea and the sky.” Corot had called him the “king of the skies”, and Alexandre Dumas fils, addressing the painter, said: “You are the man of the skies par excellence.”
Boudin enacts that small domestic revolution which, as had happened with Turner and above all with Constable, leads him to consider only the space of the sky as the subject of his work. The sky thus becomes the center of a vision that unites the intimate measures of one’s birthplace with the vastness of the heavens strewn with clouds — like a rain of varied-colored nimbus between dawn and sunset.

Room 13

It was in the countryside just outside Paris, to the west of the city, that the new taste for the Impressionist landscape took shape. These were the landscapes along the course of the Seine, from Louveciennes to Bougival, before Argenteuil — beginning in 1872 with Monet — became the true center of that kind of painting.
They were places filled with a brightness, a light, that seemed perfect for young modern painters who no longer sought the heroic solitude of forests, but instead desired contact with the murmur of a different kind of nature — a daily, familiar one. Villages that retained a strong rural character were crowned by vast open skies, the descendants of Boudin’s, beside the flowing waters of the great river. It was the painting of the feeling of a day in the countryside, or along the course of the Seine and its tributaries.
At the end of the summer of 1878, Monet left Argenteuil, and in a moment of pressing financial difficulty decided to move northward, still following the river’s course, to Vétheuil. The painting in this room is a perfect Impressionist study of what it means to paint a sky scattered with moving clouds, mirrored and reflected upon the water — a daily boundary.

Room 14

From his point of pause — shifting in space and in spirit — and in his fascination with the thresholds painted by Matisse, Mark Rothko allows the passage toward the inner boundary to become in his painting an event devoid of tangible images. The French derivation of his research, that surface sheet of intense sensuality born from his having looked at and loved the skin of so many painters included with him in this exhibition — from the late Monet absorbed in his work at Giverny, whom you will encounter in the next room, to the soft and intricate blossoming of Bonnard’s color, and indeed to Matisse himself — sometimes contrasts with the element of sacredness and asceticism that is innately part of him. That sense of the sacred which leads, as in Hopper and Wyeth — to remain within America — toward a supernatural truth, toward eternity.
“To evoke” is a word that suits well the paintings Rothko began creating from the early 1950s onward, before, in the following decade — his final one of work — he turned, with certain exceptions such as the painting in this room, toward an obscuring of light and color. Toward the construction of a night, as in the canvas you encountered in the first room. As though the journey within the boundaries of the psyche were reaching its deepest point — almost a point of no return.

Room 15

In the 1880s and 1890s, beginning with his painting campaign in Normandy in 1882, Monet’s skies changed ever more profoundly — no longer subjected to the absolute rule of plein air. Especially the second of these two decades marked an extraordinarily new point in his art, with the beginning of the so-called “series,” among which the one devoted to the Water Lilies is the foremost and best known. His views of London, painted during his stays between 1899 and 1901, form an interlude in the years when extensive work was being carried out on the garden surrounding his house at Giverny.
Why, then, do Monet’s Water Lilies belong in this exhibition whose theme is the boundary? And, in the same way, why does a garden belong here? Until now, the great natural boundaries have appeared — the Romantic categories of space: mountains, seas, and skies. Yet now a garden presents itself within its brief confines, and would seem to deny those spaces that stretch toward the infinite. Spaces that Monet himself had explored many times, until the moment he withdrew to Giverny and made of that garden a world — the sum of all his journeys, of all the boundaries he had crossed and from which he had returned.
The garden appears as the conclusion of the journey, the place where all experiences are gathered and life is reviewed in its vast unfolding, filled with memories and premonitions. The garden is therefore no longer merely a physical space — it is neither map nor topography — but rather the enchanted sum of past, present, and future.

Room 16

The final room of the exhibition explores, through the work of five extraordinary artists who painted almost entirely in the twentieth century, the varied intonations of skies depicted in places often far apart, yet always yielding moments of profound and intimate emotion before the vast space that holds within itself all boundaries. Five painters who embody the deepest meaning of this journey now drawing to its close.
The slightly misted atmosphere of Norwegian summer nights, veiled in the whiteness of the moon, seems to have been among Munch’s most beloved subjects — nights entirely mirrored, their star-strewn skies reflected in the Oslo fjord. Or the marshes and canals of Mondrian, over which lie the striated Dutch skies that recall the early Van Gogh.
Then the sky above Paris in Nicolas de Staël — the boundary into which one might rest, grasped from the side of the soul, allowing him to merge the act of representing with that of abstracting. Or the skies of Emil Nolde, filled with clouds driven by the wind over the wide plains of North Frisia, before those inscribed red poppies give form to a poetic resistance during the tragic world conflict.
And finally, truly at the end of the journey, two further paintings by Edward Hopper. A painter who, in his American skies, creates a boundary fully expanded toward the infinite. He has left, in the realm of the suspended landscape — emptied of human presence — a mark not easily forgotten. In him lies the sum of all the boundaries of this exhibition.