The Monterey Museum of Art presents From Dawn to Dusk. Gottardo Piazzoni’s Final Murals, an exhibition on view through December 2012.
Gottardo Piazzoni, The Forest from the Mural Suite, 1945, oil on canvas mounted to aluminum honeycomb panel, collection of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Transfer from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Asian Art Museum through the joint Committee to Site the Piazzoni Murals
Gottardo Piazzoni (1872-1945) moved from Switzerland to his family’s ranch in Carmel Valley in 1887. Subsequent study in Paris and San Francisco exposed the young Piazzoni to the revolutionary artistic developments of modernism and the muted symbolic pallet of tonalism which infuses his paintings of the California landscape. Piazzoni’s most ambitious project was a series of fourteen monumental murals commissioned for the San Francisco public library—now the Asian Art Museum. The murals were removed and conserved when the building was renovated in 1999. Ten murals are on permanent display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The final four—entitled Dawn, The Forest, The Mountain and Night—were completed the year of the artist’s death in 1945. These magnificent murals have been generously lent from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to the Monterey Museum of Art.
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