Exhibition: The Making of Modern Italy: Art and Design in the Early 1960s (Estorick Collection, London 2019) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Il Radicale - The Soul of Italian Design, October 2010
In its sophistication and perfection, where material and form together create unique objects that appear effortlessly natural, Italian design is always looked upon with much envy. As we aspire to own that piece of Made-in-Italy, what we see today as iconic symbols of status and quality, are the result of a deeprooted fermenting of concepts, prototypes, research, that began in the 1960s and evolved together with Italy's changing political, cultural, social and economic landscape. From the reconstruction of the post-war years to the boom of the '50s and '60s, from the petrol crises of the '70s to the anni di piombo (literally "years of lead", referring to the wave of bombings by extreme left and right-wing groups that swept the country) and finally the recovering economy and a revival boom of the '80s and '90s.
Italian Art circa 1968: Continuities and Generational Shifts
Carte Italiane
Nineteen sixty-eight has long been heralded as a, if not the, pivotal moment of the post-World War II decades. Following the assassinations of Malcolm X and both Kennedys, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the war in Vietnam, the first manned space flights, the Second Vatican Council and the invasion of technology throughout Europe, that single year was perhaps the most powerful and techtonic paradigm shift of the many that the decade already had witnessed. The student uprisings in Paris, the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact troops all exacerbated what had been a markedly violent period, quelling the optimism that had marked much of the decade and setting the tone for the coming malaise of the 1970s.
Crafting design in Italy: From post-war to postmodernism
2015
oversee the transformation of western civilisation under Fascist leadership in much the same way as imperial and papal Rome had done. To begin with, Kallis argues, Rome was seen by the regime as a means of confirming Fascism's political leadership of the international fascist movement. The rise of Nazi Germany, however, soon put paid to such political ambitions, forcing the regime to change tack; Rome now became the basis of its claim to the spiritual leadership of a universal fascism. Third Rome was intended as a eutopia, 'a place of realised perfection' (p. 45). In fact, as the 1930s progressed, Fascism's major ex nihilo projects such as the monumental 'cities' of the Foro Mussolini and E42, and the new peripheral suburbs and new towns of the Agro Pontino, represented heterotopias, 'other spaces' that 'captured and simulated a Fascist alternative future order in fundamental difference to their surrounding space and time' (p. 163). Nowhere was the gap between idealised space and reality more pronounced that at E42. Intended as the last word in Fascist Rome's claim to universalism, E42 became 'a space of pure desire … an unreal and alien simulacrum of an "imagined" Rome, contrived to entertain the supposed international triumph of Fascism that was quickly slipping away' (p. 244). One might quibble with the balance of the book (do we need such a lengthy discussion of the debates on urban planning and architecture?), and the pedant in me cannot resist pointing out that it was Renato, not Corrado, Ricci (p. 165), who was the driving force behind the Foro Mussolini. Such minor criticisms, however, should not detract from what is a very fine book.
Res Mobilis
The paper explores transatlantic dialogues in design during the postwar period and how America looked to Italy as alternative to a mainstream modernity defined by industrial consumer capitalism. The focus begins in 1950, when the American and the Italian curated and financed exhibition Italy at Work. Her Renaissance in Design Today embarked on its three-year tour of US museums, showing objects and environments designed in Italy's postwar reconstruction by leading architects including Carlo Mollino and Gio Ponti. The exhibition was hugely popular; celebrated by the public and critics as expressing Italy's continuing "unity of the arts" and a combination of craft tradition and design innovation that offered an alternative modernity to America's all-out industrialization. The exhibition led to the production and retail of Italian-designed wares by several US firms, contributing to Italian design's popularity in the States and shaping, through Gio Ponti's action too, an image shared nowadays.
ITALY CREATES. GIO PONTI, AMERICA AND THE SHAPING OF THE ITALIAN DESIGN IMAGE
Res Mobilis Revista internacional de investigación en mobiliario y objetos decorativos, 2018
The paper explores transatlantic dialogues in design during the postwar period and how America looked to Italy as alternative to a mainstream modernity defined by industrial consumer capitalism. The focus begins in 1950, when the American and the Italian curated and financed exhibition Italy at Work. Her Renaissance in Design Today embarked on its three-year tour of US museums, showing objects and environments designed in Italy's postwar reconstruction by leading architects including Carlo Mollino and Gio Ponti. The exhibition was hugely popular; celebrated by the public and critics as expressing Italy's continuing "unity of the arts" and a combination of craft tradition and design innovation that offered an alternative modernity to America's all-out industrialization. The exhibition led to the production and retail of Italian-designed wares by several US firms, contributing to Italian design's popularity in the States and shaping, through Gio Ponti's action too, an image shared nowadays. Resumen El artículo explora los diálogos transatlánticos en el diseño durante el periodo de postguerra y la manera en que América miró a Italia como alternativa a la corriente convencional definida por el consumo industrial capitalista. Se inicia en 1950, cuando los americanos y los italianos comisariaron y financiaron la exhibición Italy at Work. Her Renaissance in Design Today embarcada en un tour de tres años por los museos Americanos, enseñando objetos y ambientes diseñados en la Italia de la reconstrucción postbélica por destacados arquitectos incluyendo Carlos Mollino y Gio Ponti. La exposición fue
Exhibiting Italian Modernism After World War II at MoMA in ‘Twentieth-Century Italian Art’
Methodologies of Exchange: MoMA’s “Twentieth-Century Italian Art” (1949), monographic issue of Italian Modern Art, 3, 2020
Foregrounded as a kind of exploratory survey of work outside of the “two formidable counter-attractions in Europe—the Parisian present and the Italian past,” Twentieth-Century Italian Art curated a particular view of Italian modern art. The 1949 exhibition at MoMA would become the precedent for international investigations of Italian modern and avant-garde art, and one that represented Italy as a modern democracy. In part to uphold this idea, curators Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and James Thrall Soby presented Italian modernism as apolitical aesthetic experiments. In part, the works were selected by using Fascist art world contacts and exhibitions as guides, which helped shape Barr’s coalescing vision for a modernist hegemony. The installation also foregrounded a depoliticization of the cultural production of the former combatant country. The works were not presented in the more innovative manner seen in exhibitions like the prewar We Like Modern Art (1940–41) or the wartime Road to Victory (1942), which gained inspiration from the same avant-garde exhibition models that Fascist exhibitions like the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (1932–34) had evoked. Rather, the exhibition was installed in a more deadpan manner, with most works displayed with ample space at similar heights. Precedent for this installation style can be seen in MoMA as well as in Italy, particularly in the presentations at the Rome Quadriennale of the 1930s and 40s. Barr and Soby were able to visually reframe the production of Italian artists as part of a transatlantic modernist project, rather than an Italian Fascist one.
DESIGNING A NEW HUMAN HABITAT: COLLABORATIONS BETWEEN ITALIAN ARTISTS AND ARCHITECTS IN THE 1960s
In the wake of World War II artists and architects sensed a growing need to create a new "habitat" for human beings. Debates on how art and architecture should work together and give birth to a new concept of building and living was imbued with utopian ideas and an unbridled faith in technology. Architects, as well as artists with an attentive eye for architecture, declared the end of the Rationalist and Functionalist period of the 1920s and 30s. Asserting that form no longer needed to follow function, they laid claim to a newfound freedom in the creation and the organisation of everyday life and a growing interest in the human sciences. Environmental research by artists was soon tied to social, ideological and political issues, shifting reflections toward the meaning of habitat and dwelling. In parallel, architects sought to renew their language and methodologies based on a greater openness towards more urgent problems: first and foremost housing, followed by the relationship between contemporary man and his environment. In Italy the most interesting collaborations between artists and architects occurred in the 1960s. Arte Programmata and the new languages of art inspired by mass media, together with scientific and sociological studies, inspired various experimental projects. Some examples. The artist and designer Enzo Mari and the architect Bruno Morassutti tested applications of the Arte Programmata theory to the design of the human habitat. The architect Leonardo Savioli invited artists using light and sound technologies to collaborate with his students on the design of a new kind of club. The artist Bruno Munari, together with the architects Lorenzo Forges Davanzati and PieroRanzani, designed a modular furnishing system for modern apartments. The Milan Triennale also offered another important experimental ground (in particular the 1964 and 1968 editions). It was here that ideas about a new habitat were applied to the exhibition space, making use of the era's most advanced technologies and recognising Pop imagery as the expression of a rising mass culture.