Bernard Berenson, gli Stein, Matisse e Picasso: prime ricognizioni a mo’ di cronologia ragionata

Bernard Berenson, the Steins, Matisse and Picasso: first recons and a reasoned chronology Michele Dantini Bernard Berenson’s fame is primarily linked to his work as a connoisseur and scholar of ancient art. His relationship with contemporary art has rarely been investigated. When this was done, in studies of great merit, however, Berenson was criticized for his anti-modernist prejudice and his aversion to abstract art. Decades later, we can now change this point of view: not only because abstract art is no longer an indisputable and normative reference for us, but above all because we can consider with renewed interest the multiplicity of perspectives underlying the reflection of Berenson on fau- vism, cubism and surrealism, muralism and social realism: perspectives that are civil, historical, political and religious as well as aesthetic. Here in my essay it is not only the “civil” Berenson who occupies the foreground – a “public intellectual” of the kind we rarely encounter in art history – but Berenson as critic, scholar of aesthetics and art theory, whose teachings about «tactile values» contribute directly, to a consider- able extent and to date scarcely considered, to the self-reflection of painters such as Matisse or Braque and to their fruitful approach to ancient art.