Troubetzkoy 150 presents 150 works selected 150 years after the birth of artist Paolo Troubetzkoy (Intra 1866) with an exhibition that tells a taste of European Belle Epoque, those elegant, worldly and modernists years, interpreted by the Verbania sculptor who recalls the history of Pallanza itself, its touristic destination for European aristocracy, its luxurious hotels on the lakefront.
International in the DNA (born in Intra by a Russian prince, Peter, and a US opera singer, Ada Winas, at 36 married a Swede, Elin Sundstrom), Paolo Troubetzkoy was a globetrotting artist. We find him in Milan very young for a first period of education, documented in the exhibition with photographs, historical documents and his works, then he moved to Russia, but over the years also in Paris, he has a studio in London and then he goes again in France, where he lived until his death, in 1938, alternating summer holidays in Villa Cabianca, Suna.
The exhibition presents his favorite materials and subjects: elegant female figures, delicate nudes, animals, dancers and live portraits, light sculptures that seem to be able to speak. The secret of the lightness of the sculptures by Troubetzkoy is in fact the processing of soft materials such as clay, molded wax and use its unusually slender, tapering fingers, leaving the malleable material of colorful brushstrokes and full of temperament, that convey the essence of his psycho-physical nature and react differently to light. Famous are the coatings of his plaster - bronze, ocher, olive green - and the use of lost wax casting technique, unique in its view, that could keep all the details of the original artifact.
The partial reconstructed of Troubetzkoy’s beloved French studio and the smaller one in Suna – destroyed by a fire, close the exhibition.
