20th century Italian art

Restituire una visibilità storiografica e critica alle donne che hanno “fatto arte” in Trentino tra la fine dell’Ottocento e la fine del Novecento: questo è lo scopo fondamentale di questo libro, frutto di una ricerca intrapresa dall’autore a tutto campo, su materiali spesso inediti e in una prospettiva dichiaratamente “di genere”. Nel volume sono confluiti i risultati di un’indagine effettuata a più riprese nei musei, in archivi pubblici e privati e soprattutto nelle collezioni private del Trentino, da cui sono emersi nomi e volti di una compagine finora invisibile: quella delle numerose pittrici e delle rare scultrici attive in Trentino nel corso del XX secolo. Si è trattato, per molti aspetti, di un lavoro di scavo effettuato ex novo, alla ricerca di vicende e carriere artistiche completamente dimenticate. Per alcune delle personalità considerate mancavano, infatti, i dati minimi per poterle valutare o rivalutare in sede critica: assenti o lacunosi i dati anagrafici, ignoti o mal delineati i percorsi formativi, sconosciute le opere e la loro ubicazione. Il volume vuole dunque essere soprattutto un compendio di dati e un repertorio di immagini, vale a dire uno strumento di consultazione destinato non solo ai cultori di storia dell’arte, ma anche a tutti coloro che intendono approfondire il contributo offerto dalle donne allo sviluppo culturale e sociale del Trentino.

L’antimateria è il soggetto ideale di una fisica per poeti. Persino nell’ineccepibile vocabolario Treccani si legge ad vocem, con una formulazione involontariamente ironica: “il motivo dell’assoluta prevalenza della materia sull’antimateria nell’universo osservato non è ancora chiaro”. Chiara invece, anche ai poeti, era la loro differenza. Michel Foucault, ad esempio, riconosceva un potere alle parole di André Breton rispetto a quelle di Sartre, alla rivoluzione rispetto alla storia, al surrealismo rispetto al marxismo ortodosso o all’esistenzialismo. Foucault distingueva un regime della rivoluzione e un regime della storia, uno che mirava a cambiare la vita, l’altro la politica. Al punto che Breton puntava a creare un’antimateria rispetto al mondo. Se quest’operazione si realizza esclusivamente sul terreno della scrittura e del linguaggio – un libro, una frase, una parola –, nulla ci impedisce di estenderla alla sfera visiva.

En el año 1950 México desembarca en Italia. Durante la XXV Bienal de Venecia se exponen por primera vez en Europa obras del arte mexicano posrevolucionario que, desde entonces, circularán en el continente europeo a través de exposiciones y publicaciones. Concretamente en Italia, las experiencias del muralismo mexicano están consideradas un modelo indispensable para muchos artistas e intelectuales. Además,
constituyen una inspiración para el nacimiento de un movimiento de arte público que se expresa a través de la producción de murales de claro contenido político durante el período comprendido entre 1950 y 1980. Este ensayo muestra cómo el muralismo constituye un espacio de intercambio fructífero entre los dos contextos abordados,
rompiendo el estereotipo que siempre ha visto con una mirada eurocéntrica la relación artística entre México e Italia de forma unidireccional.

This article explores the shift in tenor and style undertaken by the Milan-based Movimento Arte Nuclear in between 1951 and 1959. Specifically, it explores the Enrico Baj's anarchic humanism affecting his depiction of the human figure influenced by the postwar trauma of a looming nuclear catastrophe.

The ‘cut’ paintings of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899 – 1968) are intensely sexual objects. For many viewers, their rawly coloured surfaces ruptured by deep vertical gashes strongly evoke female genitalia. Fontana’s violent cutting of the canvas has also been compared to the muscular gestures of male ‘action’ painters such as Jackson Pollock. What such interpretations fail to grasp, however, is the critique of gender identity, and in particular masculine identity, at the heart of Fontana’s work. However, as I will show, Fontana relied on an inversion of diametrically opposed notions of maleness and femaleness rather than any deconstruction of the opposition itself. As I outline in my paper, Fontana’s critique first emerges in the artist’s depictions of the male body immediately after Italy’s military defeat in WWII. Fontana’s limp and mangled clay warriors splashed with oozing layers of reflective glaze directly challenge the hard, ballistic ideal of the masculine body theorized in the proto-fascist writings of the Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. Drawing on the work of Hal Foster and Jeffrey Schnapp on the representation of fascist masculinity, I argue that Fontana developed an alternative model of maleness to that encountered in the official culture of Mussolini’s Italy. Accordingly, as I also demonstrate, his work gives insight into the extraordinary transformations in male body imagery that took place in avant-garde and official cultural circles in Italy during the first half of the 20th century.

Giorgio De Chirico definitely stands out as a peculiar character of the Italian Novecento and his art ties directly with Nietzsche’s philosophy whose eternal questions paved the way to his “immanent metaphysics” which is typified and pervaded by an ever-present melancholia brought about by a heightened awareness of the death of God.
Grappling with “the world seen for the first time” De Chirico’s narrative doesn’t depict reality rather its ghost, the latter is seen by dint of revelations and hallucinations.
This paper sheds light onto some crucial kinships between the two characters as not only philosophical concerns are vital but illness too. The philosopher suffered since his very childhood from severe migraine and then from a psychiatric illness with depression while the painter unknowingly suffered from migraine aura. This ailment, affecting the fragile border amid perceived reality and hallucinated reality, turned out to be a remarkable source of inspiration which boosted the visions and the enigmas the artist was entwined with.
Overall, Nietzsche ushered in a picture of the world that De Chirico has wholeheartedly shared, however, in the light of his disorder, the empathy went even further and this is the noteworthy aspect this paper aims at underscoring.

This paper seeks to reinsert Boccioni’s philosophical ambitions into the discourse surrounding the genesis of Futurist art in Italy, and to better position 'The City Rises' within the landscape of early modernist thought. I argue, somewhat against the received wisdom concerning this painter, that Boccioni’s 'The City Rises' not only stems from the theoretical exchanges that were so important to the formation of Futurist art in and around 1910; it also engages the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most important critics of the modern condition. Boccioni’s stylistic decisions respond—deeply but not altogether systematically—to Nietzsche’s theory of will to power, to his violent interrogations of established ideals, as well as to the philosopher’s own aphoristic style of writing. My analysis, then, throws into sharper relief the intellectual forces motivating one of the early twentieth century’s most accomplished painters by investigating one of the more sophisticated, if neglected, intersections of modernist art and philosophy.

(Readers, please see my note at the end of the text.)

Considering as a point of reference the exhibition on the Environmental Art The Space of Image, held in 1967, the article explores the Art photo-documentation published on the Italian Art Periodicals during the Sixties. Thanks to the database www.capti.it, this study proposes a new reading of the photo of Environment and Installation, also based on a statistical approach. The origin of this photographic genre shows some unexpected relations with other photographic practices: the reportage, the photo of architecture and the Art galleries advertising. The documentation status of Photography is thus contaminated with different editing practices.

Burri’s paintings, with their emphasis upon process, exhibit the effects actions and time have upon matter –the wear and tear of burlap sacks, further stressed in areas by the artist and conspicuously repaired, integrated into the plane in one series of pictures, or the accelerated craquelure of paint in another.  Burri embraces the reality -or materiality- of matter, out of which he builds up a painting.

This article focuses on the exhibition '1935 Gli artisti nell’Università e la questione della pittura murale', curated by Simonetta Lux and Ester Coen, and arranged in the Palazzo del Rettorato of La Sapienza University in Rome in 1985. The reconstruction of the exhibition project and its narrative is framed in the cultural debate on the memory of fascism developed during the 1980s. In this decade, there is indeed a paradigm shift in the public reception of the art of the Ventennio. By exploring a triangulation among research, exhibitions, and restorations, this study traces the transition from the neglect and physical concealment of fascist iconographies to the study and preservation of works of art related to fascist propaganda.

This essay examines Bruno Munari’s innovative picture books within the broader context of his ‘major’ artistic work. Specifically, it illustrates and discusses how Munari’s production that is linked to Futurism, Abstractionism, or Concrete art, has been remediated in his books and activities for children. Munari’s work is on this score an unparalleled example of the ways the visual language of experimental art could be translated into effective and meaningful visual experiences for lay people, including children.

A dream of a life of fame is not why men join the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church. Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture La Nona Ora (1999) of Pope John Paul II depicts a scene where the Pope has been struck down by a meteorite that has crashed through a skylight from the heavens. This is a particularly apocalyptic fate for a figure who, during his extremely long tenure as Pope, reached an unparalleled level of celebrity in his native Poland and worldwide. However, this status of fame, which manifested itself in depictions of this holy figure in mass media representations, paraphernalia and cheap souvenirs, is problematic for an individual whose life and spirit are meant to be devoted to the Church. Cattelan's extremely controversial installation of the sculpture at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw called into question the nature of the unprecedented meteoric rise of this religious leader and aimed to draw out the issues surrounding the celebrity status of this figure, especially in his native Poland. This paper examines the problem of celebrity in the figures of the Catholic Church through an in depth analysis of Cattelan's work and the role of the modern Pope.

South Eastern College Art Conference
University of North Carolina at Greensborough
October 2013

Panel: Illustrious Individuals: Visual Articulations of Celebrity and Heroism.
Chairs: Lara Kuykendall, Ball State University, and Letha Clair Robertson, University of Texas at Tyler


In the first half of the 1960s, the Argentine–Italian artist Lucio Fontana created Spatial concept, an abstract painting that is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. In this work Fontana took an unorthodox approach to his medium; after punching a series of holes through the canvas with a knife, he applied an even coat of metallic paint to the ravaged surface. The process may imply violence, but the resulting composition is characterised by the utmost simplicity: a dialogue between a monochrome surface and the rupture of that surface. For this reason Fontana is often compared to twentieth-century modernist painters who have sought formal purity by reducing painting to its bare essentials. Beneath the surface of Spatial concept, however, are layers of rich and complex meaning that belie this apparent simplicity. Fontana’s painting represents neither destruction nor a reduction of painting. On the contrary, it is an eloquent visual argument for a radical expansion of the medium. To appreciate this we need to look beyond the purely visual qualities of this painting and the immediate context of its production to examine the artist’s early career, his theories of spatial art, and the large series of works beginning in 1949 to which Fontana gave the enigmatic title Spatial concept.

Questo contributo intende esplorare l’apporto di Corrente e dei suoi protagonisti al coevo scenario dell’editoria artistica, interrogando istanze, progettualità e strategie operative che nell’orizzonte del gruppo elessero lo strumento del libro a spazio di sperimentazione. Non si tratterà di ricostruire una “vicenda editoriale”, né di analizzare singoli episodi, pur rilevanti, seguendo orme già fruttuosamente solcate dalla storiografia, quanto di provare ad avviare alcune riflessioni in una prospettiva allargata, di sistema, attenta al contesto e, parallelamente, alla forma dell’edizione d’arte.

Up to now historical studies have thoroughly not investigated the cultural background and the early professional biography of the five painters Achille Bonito Oliva has includeded in the Transavant-garde (Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola  de Maria and Mimmo Paladino) yet. The main obstacles to these studies go back to the birth of Transavant-garde. From one side, the documents concerning the past of the artists -those that would not justify the belated rehabilitation of the "traditional media"- were suddenly not taken into account; and, from the other side, it emerged a clear and schematic contrast between the Transavant-garde and the preceding experience of the Arte Povera and Conceptual Art through which the militant criticism interpreted this shift.
The essay focuses on the story of the two transavant-gardists, Paladino and de Maria, with the aim of reconstructing how they join from the end of the sixties up to 1977, the "Environment-Painting" (a form of expanded and wall painting, here cosidered as a preliminary step to the Transavant-garde). The historical investigation has taken up again this corpus of documents intentionally ignored, and it has focused on the experimental beginnings of the two artists -beginnings related to the envirnoment, the performance, and particularly the photograph.
Therefore, the essay tries to give a more complex interpretation of this corpus by comparing with the contrast suggested by the militant criticism and by founding out the continuity elements of painting, or the pictorial iconography, already present in the Italian neo-avant-garde (Arte Povera, Conceptual, etc...).

https://www.horti-hesperidum.com/show.php?item=228

L’ottavo fascicolo (IV, 2014, 2), curato da Francesco Grisolia, è intitolato Studi sul Disegno italiano tra Connoisseurship e Collezionismo e comprende contributi, riflessioni e novità sull’attività grafica di diversi artisti dal Rinascimento al Novecento, così come su collezionisti e nuclei di grafica. Connoisseurship e collezionismo dialogano e si intersecano in questa raccolta dedicata al disegno italiano. Per il Cinquecento sono presenti: Bernardino Luini, Aurelio Luini e Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, di cui si esamina la pratica di firmare e annotare i disegni; il gusto per l’antico della scuola di Fontainebleau tra Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio e Léonard Thiry attraverso un foglio apparso sul mercato. Il disegno del Seicento si muove tra Firenze e Napoli: uno studio stilistico e iconografico che prende le mosse da un bozzetto di Lodovico Cardi detto il Cigoli e già ascritto a Francesco Curradi; un altro con novità sui disegni del napoletano Aniello Falcone. Sempre a Napoli ci conduce l’esame di un bozzetto su carta di Domenico Antonio Vaccaro e sul suo processo creativo. Sono presenti ricerche sulla raccolta del vicentino Pietro Stefanoni, antiquario-editore in rapporto con Cassiano dal Pozzo e Sebastiano Resta, e sul fondo di grafica del Museo Civico di Pescia, dove spicca la collezione del frate pittore Alberico Carlini da Vellano. Chiude il volume un’analisi sul disegno italiano a cavallo tra gli anni Sessanta e Settanta del XX secolo attraverso le idee e le opere di alcuni protagonisti.

This paper engages with the notion of interspace by examining an understudied and unpublished cycle of mosaics and frescoes destined for the main hall of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome’s south-western suburb of EUR, a major building project by Roman
architect Adalberto Libera. It first provides a socio-historical and aesthetic background to the building of EUR as Rome’s international exposition of 1942, which aimed to celebrate
the achievements of Italian (and fascist) civilisation. It then focuses on the concept of Romanità (or Roman-ness) as a mythical and idealised past that was engaged on a number
of levels as a teleological foundation for the advent (and eternity) of fascist rule. This past was adopted, interpreted and made manifest at the urban scale in the master plan of EUR,
at the architectural scale in the buildings and at the interior scale in the decorative programs incorporated in each. It argues that the Palazzo dei Congressi allows us to gain further insight into the notion of interspace as it exemplifies this on a number of physical,
symbolic and temporal levels. Physically, in the urban space, architectural form and interiors; symbolically, in the content and compositional layout of the mosaics; and temporally, in the use of historical elision and conflation between mythical pasts and idealised present.

This paper examines a series of works by Giuseppe Penone, titled 'Cambiare l’immagine' and executed in 1973, with the aim to highlight two closely related aspects that make it a peculiar work in the coeval Italian context and in the career of the Turinese artist: his relationship with the graphics of Leonardo da Vinci and the problem of figurative
drawing in Italian conceptualist art. The analysis starts from the work's
role at the 1976 exhibition 'Drawing / Transparence' and from its insertion in Penone's 1977 book 'Rovesciare gli occhi': these attestations allow to place the work within the poetics and the cultural references of the young artist. In this perspective, the analysis of the visual sources from the Windsor drawings by Leonardo in the series of six sheets, either collages or drawings, must be related to the works that since 1968 show the artist’s specific attention to this Old Master. The survey of the ways in which Penone uses these sources highlights the crucial passage of 1973, when the artist assumes the «conceptual» character of Leonardo’s draftsmanship to insert figuration and autography in his own works. Few years later a direct development of this processing results in the series of drawings of the air movements linked to the terracotta entitled Soffio, and included in the catalogue of the important exhibition of Penone set up in Essen in 1978. In this case Penone copies, assembles and reinvents the same Leonardo’s drawings, using traditional graphic techniques and stylisms, clarifying the reasons for adopting a specific language that legitimizes, as had already happened in nuce within Cambiare l’immagine, figurative drawing.

La relazione si propone lo scopo di ricostruire il percorso artistico della scultrice francese Germaine Richier, ripercorrendone attività espositiva e processo creativo. I capitoli finali, inoltre, sono dedicati al dialogo con le coeve esperienze italiane, alla ricerca di un nuovo linguaggio comune che accomuni la scultura moderna internazionale.