A Villa Built During Milan’s Fascist Period Finds a Second Life

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/t-magazine/piero-portaluppi-de-carlo-gallery.html

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FASCISM PROVED CATACLYSMIC for Italy’s economy and its soul, but it was excellent for its architecture. In the United States, the onset of the Great Depression began a fallow period for good buildings (with the notable exception of those by Frank Lloyd Wright), but the rise of Benito Mussolini between the two world wars had an electrifying effect on Italian design; Mussolini developed strong ties with the burgeoning industrial class, which meant money abounded for both private villas and monumental public works.

As a former Socialist Party functionary, Mussolini knew little of art or edifice. What he had instead was good timing: While he was first gaining power in the 1920s, loyalist journalists like Margherita Sarfatti, who was also one of his mistresses, dreamed up the Modernist-cum-Classical Novecento movement to refresh the style of imperial Rome, envisioning the dictator as a new emperor. Then there was Rationalism, with its uncluttered geometries and robust indigenous materials (locally quarried stone and hand-forged metals) that reflected Mussolini’s Italy-first ethos. At the same time, the International Style was overtaking Europe, its steel-and-glass swagger aligning with the dictator’s muscular nationalism.

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Not all Italian architects of the era were Fascist sympathizers, of course, but the movement did herald an unprecedented era of building; corporations, including Pirelli and Fiat, commissioned new headquarters or palazzos. Until the mid-30s at least, when the more grotesque sides of Fascism could no longer be ignored, politics seemed beside the point: Architects knew such creative freedom would not soon come again.

Piero Portaluppi was one of the many who wasted no time. Among the most prolific of the era’s architects, he left his mark everywhere in Milan (where he designed more than 100 buildings), though until Luca Guadagnino’s 2009 film “I Am Love” made a star of its setting, Villa Necchi Campiglio — which Portaluppi created in 1935 for two powerful bourgeois families — he had fallen into relative obscurity, tainted after the war by his professional association with the regime.

But beauty will not be ignored, even if its origin is complex. Portaluppi’s work, much of which survived the World War II bombings, ranges from the elegantly understated and judiciously decorative to the playful and ironic, a mix that feels distinctly untotalitarian. (His grandson, Piero Castellini Baldissera, 81, an architect still living in an apartment at Casa degli Atellani, the Milanese estate purchased in 1490 by an aristocrat and later restored and occupied by Portaluppi for over 40 years until his death in 1967, has described his forebear as no “more fascist than … other important architects of the time.”) In any case, Portaluppi wasn’t much for the outsize Novecento archways or the exaggerated contours of Futurism, a style Mussolini appropriated.

THE PUREST EXPRESSION of Portaluppi’s vision can perhaps be found in Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, a blocky vertical villa in Milan’s Città Studi neighborhood, finished in 1936 for another powerful family (its patriarch, August von Wassermann, a German-born bacteriologist, pioneered the Wassermann test, still used to diagnose syphilis). Unlike the Villa Necchi Campiglio, which was reconceived after World War II by the architect Tomaso Buzzi, who added some rococo touches to the interior, Casa Corbellini-Wassermann remains a perfect fusion of Modernism and Rationalism: cerebral severity enlivened by rich surfaces. In February, following a meticulous two-and-a-half-year renovation, the ground floor opened as the flagship gallery of Massimo De Carlo, a contemporary art dealer with spaces in Hong Kong and London. “I wanted to challenge the idea of the white box,” says De Carlo, 61. “And there is nothing less ‘white box’ than this.”

The restoration, on which the Milan-based architect and industrial designer Antonio Citterio advised, was relatively minor considering what the building and the city had been through. The bottom two floors of its five-story exterior, clad in rectangular blocks of pinkish-gray Italian Ornavasso marble, remained pristine, as did the spiral bronze staircase in the courtyard. The Piasentina veranda at the bottom of the stair, laid in an irregular pattern that contrasts with the orderly geometry of the outside, was also intact.

From inside, it is hard to imagine that a family called such a chilly place home (they did so until the 1980s, when the building was sold and the space that is now the gallery served as an office for an oil company before being left empty for more than a decade). The ground floor itself, with 14-foot ceilings, is 6,500 square feet; in photographs of the public rooms from the 1940s, there are clusters of velvet-upholstered Deco barrel chairs and fires in the many hearths, some with mantels made of woven copper and marble in shades of claret, ebony and pine. But even with carpets to soften the effect, the area must have felt cavernous. (The upper floors are still divided into private apartments.)

Stripped of furnishings to make way for changing exhibitions, the inlaid floors of six types of marble, including Verde Issoire and Rosso Levanto, create a surprisingly natural blueprint for a gallery, a subtle way to guide visitors through the installations. But it is the massive entrance hall that speaks most to Portaluppi’s erudition: All four walls are frescoed floor to ceiling with a whimsical map of Milan and its environs in tones of butter, ocher, coral and jade. Each of the small towns outside the city is represented with a cluster of charming buildings; the country estates of the Corbellini-Wassermanns are highlighted in particularly elaborate renderings, and throughout, the game birds they loved to hunt are superimposed, as if in flight. The insouciance of the fresco recalls another Portaluppi project, no longer standing: the 1930 alpine Wagristoratore, a surreal building constructed of two train cars cantilevered far above the ground, made to appear as if they were running directly into a central three-story structure.

In the new gallery, De Carlo has tried to respect both Portaluppi’s puckishness and his influence. The first show (through July 13), a collaboration with the curator Francesco Bonami, is called “MCMXXXIV” — the year the villa was begun, as well as the year that Mussolini consolidated his power through a referendum — and juxtaposes 1930s and ’40s Italian sculpture and canvases with works by Rudolf Stingel, Richard Prince and Félix González-Torres, as well as lesser-known artists including the France-based portraitist Yan Pei-Ming. But while the art is arresting on its own, the space asserts itself as the least neutral of backgrounds, a reminder that the works are burnished by Portaluppi’s and Italy’s complicated history — just as De Carlo intended. “You want the place to change what people see and how they see it,” he says. “You want things that have not been together before to be together in a place that itself has a life.”