Moi! Autoritratti del XX secolo

Inaugurated on September 17, 2004 in the Galleria degli Uffizi, the exhibition offers the visitor an extremely vast and elastic panorama of the production of artists who, internationally and in the course of the XX century, marked the most varied artistic expressions.In the study of the self by means of their own self-portraits, they have left traces of the problems that tie history to sociology, psychoanalytic studies to the unrest and interrogatives that traversed the century.

From the exhibition's first showing in Paris at the Musée du Luxembourg, this past spring, its author and curator Pascal Bonafoux conceived an itinerary free of classificatory rigidity, in his own words "humbly" selecting the artists' different ways of representing themselves.A study itinerary, rich in interrogatives:self-portraits observed from outside, their genesis explored:by contrast or by comparison in order to evidence resemblance, mask and variation of expression, the sign of history, or the use of metamorphosis.Even through a simple signature, anywhere, the artist's gaze, his body, though drifting off into vanity is easy, as the mirror and photography show.

To name only a few of the artists' portraits or concepts of self on show, a hodgepodge selection of the works include:Magritte, Duchamp, Fontana, De Chirico, Arman, Brancusi, Beuys and Vasarely, as well as Morandi, Chagall, Warhol, Schiele, and Suzanne Valadon and Kathe Kollwitz, to name the always smaller female presence.

Following the acclaim it received in Paris, the exhibition has now come to Florence thanks to the hospitality offered by the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Fiorentino which, in collaboration with Firenze Mostre and Firenze Musei, again proposes the works selected for the French venue, but with a few variations.

The self-portrait is at home in Florence, the city where fortunate intuition gave birth to the first collection of artists' portraits which in more than three centuries has come to form a corpus, unique for quantity and quality.Our mind turns to cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, the first to collect this type of portrait, and to how the collection evolved and is still vibrant today with its more than 1320 self-portraits that document the world of contemporary art in Italy and abroad.

Prestige, recollection, acknowledgement, vanity, today as yesterday.Pascal Bonafoux recalls that while the common denominator of the collection was "oil on canvas," many are the ingenious and provocative techniques today that document modern experimentation and make the self-portrait heterogeneous.This is what the curator worked on in the exhibition's Florentine edition which, in its title, conserves an explicit connection with the French ideation:Moi!, the pronoun, interpreter and symbol of internationality in self-reflected iconography.Thus on the cover of the catalogue (SKIRA), the triple image of American artist Norman Rockwell subtly plays with the appearance or disappearance of eyeglasses, and refers to the well-known triple self-portrait by Johannes Gumpp in the Uffizi.

The exhibition is held in twelve rooms of the Vasari complex which will soon be restored as part of the project to enlarge and reorganise the museum.Like a double thread of Ariadne, the layout leads both the visitor and the artist, who illustrates and observes at the same time.An unending invitation to exchange roles.

The exhibition is exemplified by Keith Haring's large figure, an enormous, green profile that conveys hope to an ironical world reduced to the essential.

Lenders include numerous foreign museums, private collections and, of course, many pieces from the Uffizi collection.