The Estorick Collection

The Estorick is home to a timeless collection of modern Italian art, writes Andrew Mead

Northampton Lodge, a late-Georgian villa at the corner of Canonbury Square in Islington, north London, was once the home of Basil Spence's practice and later that of Sandy Wilson's. But for the last 10 years it has served as a gallery, housing the Estorick Collection of modern Italian art. Tate director Nicholas Serota led the tributes at the recent anniversary party, while Michael Estorick – son of the collection's founder – launched a funny but blistering attack on the philistinism of the current government.

The event inaugurated a new show that presents the Estorick's permanent holdings over three floors. What struck me in this were the disparate ways in which artists had depicted the 20th-century city. Works by the Futurists, such as Gino Severini's The Boulevard (pictured below), can now seem too schematic and premeditated in their attempt to convey speed and fragmentation, whereas Giorgio de Chirico's empty piazzas, with their distorted perspective and sense of disquiet, are timeless. In Mario Sironi's small, thicklypainted Urban Landscape of 1924, the city has lost any romance it might once have had – the buildings are drab and uniform beneath a lowering sky. Then the mood shifts again in
the room devoted to Morandi, whose still-life compositions evoke a city skyline. Alongside
the Estorick's own cache of his etchings and drawings is a beautiful oil from Bologna's Museo Morandi. It dates from 1948 but its bleached colours could be those of a fading fresco painted 500 years before.