Giovanni Casini

Giovanni Casini holds a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. His dissertation, completed in 2018, focuses on the Paris-based dealer Léonce Rosenberg and the history of his Galerie L’Effort Moderne in the interwar period, touching on narratives of modernism, the history of collecting, the development of the art market, and the dealer as patron. Casini is currently a Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, where he is expanding his doctoral dissertation and preparing a manuscript for publication. In 2016 Casini was a Fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York and the Guggenheim Museum’s 2017–18 Hilla Rebay International Curatorial Fellow. During his time at the Guggenheim, Casini contributed to conceive the exhibition Una mirada atrás. Giorgio Morandi y los maestros antiguos, opening at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in April 2019. In addition to his expertise and work on the interwar years, Casini has conducted research and published on art from the 1950s in England, Italy, and France.

During his fellowship at CIMA, Giovanni examined the relationship between Léonce Rosenberg and Giorgio de Chirico from 1925 to the end of the decade. During his affiliation with Rosenberg, de Chirico started to work again on Metaphysical themes, reinventing them both iconographically and technically. Casini will also address de Chirico’s two-fold commitment to two rival art dealers, Rosenberg and Paul Guillaume, in relation to the artist’s practice of producing copies and multiples.

Explore Giovanni Casini’s research on academia.edu and watch a video highlighting one of the paintings at CIMA: