From the art on display to the delicious pasta served in its cafe, the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is a little bit of Italy in north London.
The Italian flavour that runs through the gallery extends to its director, Roberta Cremoncini, who was born in Florence, where she studied history of art before completing a PhD in the same subject at the University of Siena.
“I started in 1997, just before we moved in to the building, as the assistant curator, then the curator. Then I became the director in 2001. So it feels like I’ve been here forever,” says Cremoncini, who moved to London in the early 1990s.
Despite the Italian focus of the gallery, the man who actually created the collection, Eric Estorick, was born in Brooklyn and was the only child of Jewish émigrés from Russia.
It was in New York that he discovered The Gallery of Living Art in Washington Square College, a collection containing masterpieces by Picasso, Léger, Miró and Matisse that inspired him to become a collector himself.
After the second world war Estorick came to live in England, but his passion for Italian art was sparked while on honeymoon with his wife Salome in Switzerland.
During the trip he was introduced to a book about the Futurist movement written by the Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni. He then travelled to Milan and bought hundreds of works by the Italian modernist artist Mario Sironi.
“Estorick was never trained in art, but you can see from the quality of the works he bought that he had a really good eye,” Cremoncini says. “What fascinates me is how he went to Italy, without speaking the language and knowing little, and just decided to buy.”
An enduring partnership
Estorick, a sociologist, was helped by Salome, the daughter of a textile manufacturer who had left Leipzig in 1932 and settled in Nottingham. They met when Eric was returning to New York on the Queen Elizabeth, following a visit to Europe in 1947.
“They were very much a couple and everything was done together,” Cremoncini says. “Salome was more artistically trained. She went to art school and was a textile designer and probably had more of an art history background.”
The couple frequently travelled to Italy during the late 1940s and 50s, befriending many of the major artists of the day. Their collection of Italian art took shape between 1953 and 1958 and was shown in a series of major exhibitions between 1954 and 1960, both in Britain and abroad, including one at the Tate Gallery in 1956.
Six months before his death in 1993, Estorick set up the Eric and Salome Est-orick Foundation, to which he donated all his Italian works. He also sold a landscape by Wassily Kandinsky and a still life by Marc Chagall to provide the foundation with an endowment.
“We are very lucky to have an endowment,” Cremoncini says. “Especially now when it is so difficult to secure funding. At least we know we can open the doors and pay the salaries and can commit something to each exhibition. The future is secure unless something very major happens.”
The board is still a family affair, with two Estorick children being trustees of the Eric and Salome Estorick Foundation. Michael Estorick is the chairman of the board of trustees, and his sister Isobel is also a trustee. Alexander, a grandchild of Eric and Salome Estorick, sits on the board as well.
For Cremoncini, despite the endowment and the Estorick family on the board, many of her concerns are the same as those of any director of a small museum, including overseeing the finances, developing the education programme and planning exhibitions. Managing volunteers, interns and staff is a particularly important part of her job.
First crowd-funding appeal
“The HR side of my job is quite tricky,” says Cremoncini. “As we are small, we become quite involved in people’s lives. We have volunteers and interns, and I think it’s important that the interns learn something.”
Raising money is also important, and the gallery recently launched its first crowdfunding appeal. This successfully raised more than £3,000 to restore Leaving the Theatre, 1910, by Carlo Carrà, one of the key works in the collection. The restoration will be carried out by Ezio Buzzegoli, who was responsible for restoring Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo in Florence.
This Carrà painting will be among the works that will go on display in an exhibition to open in September that will present the results of a scientific analysis of a number of works in the collection and will try to reveal some of the techniques used by the artists who created them.
“Hopefully it will reveal some interesting things,” Cremoncini says. “I don’t normally have time to study our collection, so the exhibition is a good excuse to do this.”
A diverse exhibitions programme
Cremoncini says the gallery’s programme of temporary exhibitions is important to attract visitors, as it can be challenging to get people to visit the gallery. It is in a residential area of north London that feels a bit off the beaten track, although it is in fact very close to the busy shopping and eating area of Islington.
“Doing diverse exhibitions brings in different audiences,” Cremoncini says. “We not only do paintings and drawings, but also photography and applied art. They complement the permanent collection and put it into context. And if we bring people in, we can convince them of how good we are.”
Past exhibitions have explored art produced during the Fascist era; Italian artists through the eyes of photographers; and the use of photomontage in modern art.
This year’s exhibitions will include a show about Amedeo Modigliani, one the best-known modern Italian painters. It will be the first exhibition to be devoted to the artist at the gallery and it will showcase his works on paper.
“Because we are small, everything we do has to be focused. We can’t do a whole retro-spective,” Cremoncini says. “We have to do something more connected with our collection. But we can do lots of things quickly.”
While Cremoncini wants to attract visitors from all over London and beyond, the local audience is important, although the gallery has had to work hard to develop this.
“It took us time to get into the Islington imagination.
People weren’t particularly friendly at first. They thought it was going to be terrible to have queues around the block. We have never had that, but I’m working on it! Now we have lots of local support and many of our members are local.”
Overall, whether it’s appealing to a local audience or to visitors from further afield, Cremoncini feels it is important to maintain the gallery’s focus on exhibitions that relate to the collection and cover 20th-century art.
“There are other bigger and better funded galleries that deal with contemporary art in general, such as the Whitechapel and the Serpentine, as well as the commercial galleries, so we have to maintain our identity,” Cremoncini says. “We are a museum with a historical collection. That is what we are.”
The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art opened in 1998. It is housed in a Georgian Grade II- listed building that was redeveloped with the help of a £650,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The collection features more than 120 paintings, drawings, watercolours, prints and sculptures by a range of Italian modernist artists. It is renowned for its Futurist works and includes paintings by the movement’s main artists such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo and Ardengo Soffici. There are also works by Giorgio de Chirico, Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio Morandi, Mario Sironi and Marino Marini.
The collection was created by Brooklyn-born Eric Estorick, (1913-93), an American sociologist and writer who began to buy art when he came to live in England after the second world war. Six months before his death, he set up the Eric and Salome Estorick Foundation, to which he donated all his Italian works of art.
The Italian flavour that runs through the gallery extends to its director, Roberta Cremoncini, who was born in Florence, where she studied history of art before completing a PhD in the same subject at the University of Siena.
“I started in 1997, just before we moved in to the building, as the assistant curator, then the curator. Then I became the director in 2001. So it feels like I’ve been here forever,” says Cremoncini, who moved to London in the early 1990s.
Despite the Italian focus of the gallery, the man who actually created the collection, Eric Estorick, was born in Brooklyn and was the only child of Jewish émigrés from Russia.
It was in New York that he discovered The Gallery of Living Art in Washington Square College, a collection containing masterpieces by Picasso, Léger, Miró and Matisse that inspired him to become a collector himself.
After the second world war Estorick came to live in England, but his passion for Italian art was sparked while on honeymoon with his wife Salome in Switzerland.
During the trip he was introduced to a book about the Futurist movement written by the Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni. He then travelled to Milan and bought hundreds of works by the Italian modernist artist Mario Sironi.
“Estorick was never trained in art, but you can see from the quality of the works he bought that he had a really good eye,” Cremoncini says. “What fascinates me is how he went to Italy, without speaking the language and knowing little, and just decided to buy.”
An enduring partnership
Estorick, a sociologist, was helped by Salome, the daughter of a textile manufacturer who had left Leipzig in 1932 and settled in Nottingham. They met when Eric was returning to New York on the Queen Elizabeth, following a visit to Europe in 1947.
“They were very much a couple and everything was done together,” Cremoncini says. “Salome was more artistically trained. She went to art school and was a textile designer and probably had more of an art history background.”
The couple frequently travelled to Italy during the late 1940s and 50s, befriending many of the major artists of the day. Their collection of Italian art took shape between 1953 and 1958 and was shown in a series of major exhibitions between 1954 and 1960, both in Britain and abroad, including one at the Tate Gallery in 1956.
Six months before his death in 1993, Estorick set up the Eric and Salome Est-orick Foundation, to which he donated all his Italian works. He also sold a landscape by Wassily Kandinsky and a still life by Marc Chagall to provide the foundation with an endowment.
“We are very lucky to have an endowment,” Cremoncini says. “Especially now when it is so difficult to secure funding. At least we know we can open the doors and pay the salaries and can commit something to each exhibition. The future is secure unless something very major happens.”
The board is still a family affair, with two Estorick children being trustees of the Eric and Salome Estorick Foundation. Michael Estorick is the chairman of the board of trustees, and his sister Isobel is also a trustee. Alexander, a grandchild of Eric and Salome Estorick, sits on the board as well.
For Cremoncini, despite the endowment and the Estorick family on the board, many of her concerns are the same as those of any director of a small museum, including overseeing the finances, developing the education programme and planning exhibitions. Managing volunteers, interns and staff is a particularly important part of her job.
First crowd-funding appeal
“The HR side of my job is quite tricky,” says Cremoncini. “As we are small, we become quite involved in people’s lives. We have volunteers and interns, and I think it’s important that the interns learn something.”
Raising money is also important, and the gallery recently launched its first crowdfunding appeal. This successfully raised more than £3,000 to restore Leaving the Theatre, 1910, by Carlo Carrà, one of the key works in the collection. The restoration will be carried out by Ezio Buzzegoli, who was responsible for restoring Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo in Florence.
This Carrà painting will be among the works that will go on display in an exhibition to open in September that will present the results of a scientific analysis of a number of works in the collection and will try to reveal some of the techniques used by the artists who created them.
“Hopefully it will reveal some interesting things,” Cremoncini says. “I don’t normally have time to study our collection, so the exhibition is a good excuse to do this.”
A diverse exhibitions programme
Cremoncini says the gallery’s programme of temporary exhibitions is important to attract visitors, as it can be challenging to get people to visit the gallery. It is in a residential area of north London that feels a bit off the beaten track, although it is in fact very close to the busy shopping and eating area of Islington.
“Doing diverse exhibitions brings in different audiences,” Cremoncini says. “We not only do paintings and drawings, but also photography and applied art. They complement the permanent collection and put it into context. And if we bring people in, we can convince them of how good we are.”
Past exhibitions have explored art produced during the Fascist era; Italian artists through the eyes of photographers; and the use of photomontage in modern art.
This year’s exhibitions will include a show about Amedeo Modigliani, one the best-known modern Italian painters. It will be the first exhibition to be devoted to the artist at the gallery and it will showcase his works on paper.
“Because we are small, everything we do has to be focused. We can’t do a whole retro-spective,” Cremoncini says. “We have to do something more connected with our collection. But we can do lots of things quickly.”
While Cremoncini wants to attract visitors from all over London and beyond, the local audience is important, although the gallery has had to work hard to develop this.
“It took us time to get into the Islington imagination.
People weren’t particularly friendly at first. They thought it was going to be terrible to have queues around the block. We have never had that, but I’m working on it! Now we have lots of local support and many of our members are local.”
Overall, whether it’s appealing to a local audience or to visitors from further afield, Cremoncini feels it is important to maintain the gallery’s focus on exhibitions that relate to the collection and cover 20th-century art.
“There are other bigger and better funded galleries that deal with contemporary art in general, such as the Whitechapel and the Serpentine, as well as the commercial galleries, so we have to maintain our identity,” Cremoncini says. “We are a museum with a historical collection. That is what we are.”
Estorick Collection
at a glance
The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art opened in 1998. It is housed in a Georgian Grade II- listed building that was redeveloped with the help of a £650,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The collection features more than 120 paintings, drawings, watercolours, prints and sculptures by a range of Italian modernist artists. It is renowned for its Futurist works and includes paintings by the movement’s main artists such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo and Ardengo Soffici. There are also works by Giorgio de Chirico, Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio Morandi, Mario Sironi and Marino Marini.
The collection was created by Brooklyn-born Eric Estorick, (1913-93), an American sociologist and writer who began to buy art when he came to live in England after the second world war. Six months before his death, he set up the Eric and Salome Estorick Foundation, to which he donated all his Italian works of art.
