Giovanni Lista
Encyclopedia
Giovanni Lista is an Italian art historian and art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...

 born in Italy on February 13, 1943 at Castiglione del Lago (Perugia) and now living in Paris. He is an acknowledged specialist in the artistic cultural scene of the 1920s, particularly in Futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...

.

Biographical data

His university studies took place in Italy and in France and he settled permanently in Paris in February 1970.

While teaching at the university, he became a researcher at the C.N.R.S. (National Centre for Scientific Research) in 1974. After being associated with the research laboratories directed by Denis Bablet and Louis Marin, he was appointed Director of Research in 1992.

He founded the review Ligeia, dossiers sur l'art (Ligeia, Art Dossiers), in 1988. Its name is taken from the myth of the Greek siren cited by Plato.

A member of A.I.C.A. (International Association of Art Critics) and S.G.D.L. (Society of Men of Letters of France), in 1989 was rewarded the Georges Jamati Prize for the best essay on the theatre, arts and social science published in France; in 2002 the Filmcritica Prize for the best essay on cinema and photography published in Italy; in 2002 he also received the Giubbe Rosse Prize for the best literary biography essay published in Italy ; in 2010, he was awarded the Venetian Academy Silver Medal for the lectio magistralis (keynote speech) delivered at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. In France, in April 2011, the Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand awarded him the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. In Italy, in June 2011, the President Giorgio Napolitano awarded him the title of Chevalier of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

Contributions to Art Criticism

Between 1973 and 1988 he translated the writings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet and editor, the founder of the Futurist movement, and a fascist ideologue.-Childhood and adolescence:...

, Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...

, Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni was an Italian painter and sculptor. Like other Futurists, his work centered on the portrayal of movement , speed, and technology. He was born in Reggio Calabria, Italy.-Biography:...

 as well as the syntheses of plays, theoretical texts and manifestos of the Futurists by publishing several collections and anthologies which introduced and divulged the Italian avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

 in France. At the same time he developed an original approach to the work of Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...

, Robert Delaunay
Robert Delaunay
Robert Delaunay was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee...

, Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

, Jacques Villon
Jacques Villon
Jacques Villon was a French cubist painter and printmaker.-Early life:Born Gaston Emile Duchamp in Damville, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie region of France, he came from a prosperous and artistically inclined family...

, Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.- Early life :...

, Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Raymond Duchamp-Villon was a French sculptor.Duchamp-Villon was born Pierre-Maurice-Raymond Duchamp in Damville, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie region of France, the second son of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp. Of the six Duchamp children, four would become successful artists...

 and Jean Metzinger
Jean Metzinger
Jean Metzinger was a French painter.Metzinger was born in Nantes, France. Initially he was influenced by Fauvism and Impressionism, but from 1908 he was associated with Cubism. Metzinger was a member of the Section d'Or group of artists...

, dubbed "French Cubo-Futurism
Cubo-Futurism
Cubo-Futurism was the main school of painting and sculpture practiced by the Russian Futurists.When Aristarkh Lentulov returned from Paris in 1913 and exhibited his works in Moscow, the Russian Futurist painters adopted the forms of Cubism and combined them with the Italian Futurists'...

".

In 1976 he published the first biography of Marinetti, while beginning to analyse the Futurism founder's political ideas. After studying the political evolution of the Futurist movement, he explored and came to terms with the distinction, formulated by the Florentine Futurists, between "Futurism" and "Marinettism". He criticised the different unitarian approaches of Futurist political ideas and in 1980 published the essay "Art and Politics: Left-Wing Futurism in Italy" (in Italian) thus completing his historiographic reconstruction of Futuristic ideology.

In 1979 he iventoried the postal innovations of the Futurists, thus establishing a new historiographic object: "Futuristic Postal Art", proclaiming the invention of Mail Art
Mail art
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...

 by the avant-gardists of the 1920s.

That same year he began to do research on Futurist photography and on the problematic relationship that the Futurists' had with the new technological media to which he devoted several publications and a series of exhibits (Paris, Modena, Cologne, Tokyo, New York, London, Florence, 1981–2009), particularly defining the specificity of Futurist aesthetic elaboration in the fields of photo-performance, photo-collage and Photomontage
Photomontage
Photomontage is the process and result of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture was sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. A similar method, although one that does not...

, the sandwiching of several negatives.

In 1982 he organised the Futurism: Abstraction and Modernity exhibit in Paris. It explored the Futurist contributions to an abstract art
Abstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...

 centered on the tangible experience of reality.

In 1982, and then in 1984, he published a two-volume general catalogue of the works of Giacomo Balla
Giacomo Balla
Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter.-Biography:Born in Turin, in the Piedmont region of Italy, the son of an industrial chemist, as a child Giacomo Balla studied music....

, a Futuristic artist of whom he later organised a major retrospective (Milan, 2008).

In 1983, in the book De Chirico and the Avant-Garde, he assembled a rich unpublished epistolary documentation on the relationship between Italian and French artists. He also studied Giorgio De Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...

's role in the evolution of avant-garde artistic culture during World War I. Furthermore, he dedicated other essays to De Chirico, while also publishing a critical edition of the painter's writings on Metaphysical Art.

In 1984 at the Italian Cultural Institute, the Hôtel Galliffet, in Paris, he organised The Futuristic Book exhibit which revealed the extent of Futurist innovations in the areas of books-as-objects, books-as-typography, books-as-theatre, books-as-machines, graphic compositions, words-in-freedom plates, picture poetry.

In 1985 he published Futurism, a synthesis in which he makes it clear that he rejects the Second Futurism formula used in Italy to define the period following Boccioni's death. He proposes a historiographic classification by decade of the different studies on the Futuristic movement: beginning with Plastic Dynamism for the first decade, then continuing with the Mechanical Art for the 1920s and the Aeroaesthetics of the 1930s. Next, he expanded on the poetics of Mechanical Art by publishing an essay on Vinicio Paladini, who was its originator.

In 1989, and with the essay The Futuristic Scene, he explored the osmosis between the plastic arts and the theatre in all the phases of Futurist practises relating to the theatre.

In 1994 he devoted a biographical essay to Loie Fuller
Loie Fuller
Loie Fuller Loie Fuller Loie Fuller (also Loïe Fuller; (January 15, 1862 – January 1, 1928) was a pioneer of both modern dance and theatrical lighting techniques.-Career:...

 wherein he analysed multimedia dance as an anticipation of the Futurist aesthetics of this movement. He also directed the film montage "Loie Fuller and Her Imitators" which revealed the breadth and originality of this pioneer of modern dance.

That same year he published an essay on sculptor Medardo Rosso
Medardo Rosso
Medardo Rosso was an Italian sculptor. He is thought to have developed the Post Impressionism style in sculpture along with Auguste Rodin....

 while also assembling his theoretical writings on Impressionist sculpture.

In 1997, in the book The Modern Stage: World Encyclopaedia of the Performing Arts in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century (1945–1995), he investigates the different visual forms of scenic creation within the contemporary culture of imagery going beyond the dramatic text. In addition to traditional categories, such as opera, ballet, dance, circus and puppet shows, he lists the newer expressions of multimedia entertainment, of dance theatre and of artist's theatre.

In 2001 he tackled the study of Futurist cinema and advanced its discovery by organising three major retrospectives (Rovereto, Barcelona, Paris, 2001–2009).

That same year he published the book Futurism: Creation and Avant-garde, in which he considers Futurism as the highest manifestation of an identity Kunstwollen which has fertilised and nourished modern Italian art since the country's national unity was achieved.

In 2003 in the book The Black Sperm (in Italian), he raises major questions on the deep connection between Eros
Eros
Eros , in Greek mythology, was the Greek god of love. His Roman counterpart was Cupid . Some myths make him a primordial god, while in other myths, he is the son of Aphrodite....

 and writing.

In 2005 he published the essay Libertine
Libertine
A libertine is one devoid of most moral restraints, which are seen as unnecessary or undesirable, especially one who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behavior sanctified by the larger society. Libertines, also known as rakes, placed value on physical pleasures, meaning those...

 and Libertarian
, showing, beyond the protean character of Dadaism, the philosophical libertine outlook as an ideological source of Dada.

In 2009 he organised the retrospective exhibit celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the creation of the Futuristic movement in Milan. He took up his previous historiographic systematisation of Futurism, stressing its activist model, research in progress, and the poetics of an ephemerisation of art.

In 2011 he publishes the book The Stella d’Italia
The Stella d’Italia
The Stella d’Italia is the most ancient identity symbol of the Italian land. In modern times it has been associated with the Italia Turrita , the ancient allegorical representation of the Italian peninsula....

(star of Italy), an exhaustive essay about the origins and the history of the mythology of Stella Veneris, symbol of the Italian land’s identity since the time of Ancient Rome. Moreover, here he collects an extensive iconographic setting (works of art, monuments, illustrations, posters, decorative objects etc.) about the traditional allegorical representation of Italy: a draped woman with a mural crown surmounted by a star upon her head.

He also undertook to scrutinize Antoine Bourdelle
Antoine Bourdelle
Antoine Bourdelle , originally Émile Antoine Bourdelle, was an influential and prolific French sculptor, painter, and teacher.-Career:...

's Proto-Cubism, Auguste Herbin
Auguste Herbin
Auguste Herbin was a French painter.-Biography:Born in Quiévy, Nord, he studied drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts de Lille, from 1898 to 1901, when he settled in Paris....

's abstract art
Abstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...

 and Alberto Magnelli
Alberto Magnelli
Alberto Magnelli was an Italian modern painter who was a significant figure in the post war Concrete art movement.- Biography :...

; the theatrical innovations of Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...

, Pierre Albert-Birot
Pierre Albert-Birot
Pierre Albert-Birot was a French avant-garde author.Born in Angoulôme, he moved to Paris in 1894. There he attended art school and befriended Gustave Moreau. He worked for five decades as a restorer for antique dealer Madame Lelong....

, Emile Malespine; and in addition, the dialectical repercussions and reversals of the formal ideas of Futurism as they appear in the authors, artists and movements of the Neo avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century: Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of Argentine birth. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera.-Early life:...

, Alberto Burri
Alberto Burri
Alberto Burri , was an Italian abstract painter and sculptor. Città di Castello has memorialized him with a large permanent museum of his works....

, Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry
Frank Owen Gehry, is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions...

, Eugene Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...

, Arte Povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...

, Poesia Visiva, Process Art
Process art
Process art is an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment and world view where the end product of art and craft, the objet d’art, is not the principal focus. The 'process' in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, and...

, performance and Image-Theatre.

Major works

  • Marinetti et le futurisme, Éd. L'Âge d'homme, Lausanne, 1977
  • L'Art postal futuriste, Jean-Michel Place Éditeur, Paris, 1979 ISBN 978-2858930258
  • Le Livre futuriste, Éd. Panini, Modène-Paris, 1984 ISBN 88-7686-035-5
  • I futuristi e al fotografia: creazione fotografica e immagine quotidiana, Edizioni Panini, Modena, 1985
  • Futurism, Art Data, London, 2006 ISBN 0 948 835 052
  • La Scène futuriste, Éd. du C.N.R.S., Paris, 1989 ISBN 2-222-04191-0
  • De Chirico et l'avant-garde, Éd. L'Âge d'homme, Lausanne, 1990 ISBN 2-825-12413-0
  • Medardo Rosso, destin d'un sculpteur (1858–1928), Éd. L'Échoppe, Paris, 1994 ISBN 978-2840680437
  • Marinetti, l'anarchiste du Futurisme, Biographie, Éd. Séguier, Paris, 1995
  • La Scène moderne - Encyclopédie mondiale des arts du spectacle dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, Actes Sud, Arles-Paris, 1997 ISBN 2-908-39341-7
  • Futurism, Finest-Terrail, Paris-London, 2001 ISBN 2 87939 234 9
  • Le Futurisme : création et avant-garde, Éd. L'Amateur, Paris, 2001 ISBN 978-2859173227
  • Futurism and Photography, Merrel Publishers, London, 2001 ISBN 1 85894 125 3
  • Dada
    Dada
    Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

     libertin & libertaire
    , Éd. L'Insolite, Paris, 2005 ISBN 978-2916054018
  • Arte Povera
    Arte Povera
    Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...

    , Éd. Cinq Continents, Paris, 2006 ISBN 8-874-39205-6
  • Loïe Fuller
    Loie Fuller
    Loie Fuller Loie Fuller Loie Fuller (also Loïe Fuller; (January 15, 1862 – January 1, 1928) was a pioneer of both modern dance and theatrical lighting techniques.-Career:...

    , danseuse de la Belle Epoque
    , Éd. Hermann, Paris, 2007 ISBN 2-705-66625-5
  • Journal des Futurismes, Éd. Hazan, Paris, 2008 ISBN 978-2-7541-0208-7
  • Le Cinéma futuriste, Éd. du Centre Pompidou-Les Cahiers de Paris Expérimental, Paris, 2008 ISBN 978-2912539373
  • Cinéma et photographie futuriste, Skira-Flammarion, Paris, 2008 ISBN 978-2081218284
  • Giorgio De Chirico
    Giorgio de Chirico
    Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...

    , suivi de L'Art métaphysique, Éd. Hazan, Paris, 2009 ISBN 978-2-7541-0287-2
  • Luigi Russolo
    Luigi Russolo
    Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...

     e la musica futurista
    , Mudima, Milano, 2009 ISBN 978-8-8968-1700-1
  • Il Cinema futurista, Le Mani-Microart’s Edizioni, Genova, 2010 ISSN 1824-1417
  • La Stella d’Italia, Mudima, Milano, 2010 ISBN 978-88-96817-06-3

Interviews

L'époque n'est plus au théâtre mais à la scène interview, in Libération, May 21, 1997, Paris Era tutto di destra ? No, c'era anche la Futursinistra interview, in Il Giornale dell'Arte, April 2009, Torino Alle origini dello stellone interview, in Il Giornale dell’Arte, february 2011, Torino

See also

  • Abstract Art
    Abstract art
    Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...

  • Anton Giulio Bragaglia
    Anton Giulio Bragaglia
    Anton Giulio Bragaglia was a pioneer in Italian Futurist photography and Futurist cinema. A versatile and intellectual artist with wide interests, he wrote about film, theatre, and dance.-Early life:...

  • Artist book
  • Arte Povera
    Arte Povera
    Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...

  • Art of Italy
    Art of Italy
    The history of Italian art is in many ways also the history of Western art. After Etruscan civilization and especially the Roman Republic and Empire that dominated this part of the world for many centuries, Italy was central to European art during the Renaissance. Italy also saw European artistic...

  • Futurist Architecture
    Futurist architecture
    Futurist architecture is an early-20th century form of architecture characterized by anti-historicism and long horizontal lines suggesting speed, motion and urgency. Technology and even violence were among the themes of the Futurists. The movement was founded by the poet Filippo Tommaso...

  • Cubo-futurism
    Cubo-Futurism
    Cubo-Futurism was the main school of painting and sculpture practiced by the Russian Futurists.When Aristarkh Lentulov returned from Paris in 1913 and exhibited his works in Moscow, the Russian Futurist painters adopted the forms of Cubism and combined them with the Italian Futurists'...

  • Dada
    Dada
    Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

  • Enrico Prampolini
    Enrico Prampolini
    Enrico Prampolini was an Italian Futurist painter, sculptor and scenographer. He assisted in the design of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution and was active in Aeropainting....

  • Futurism
    Futurism
    Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...

     (music)
  • Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
    Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
    Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet and editor, the founder of the Futurist movement, and a fascist ideologue.-Childhood and adolescence:...

  • Giacomo Balla
    Giacomo Balla
    Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter.-Biography:Born in Turin, in the Piedmont region of Italy, the son of an industrial chemist, as a child Giacomo Balla studied music....

  • Luigi Russolo
    Luigi Russolo
    Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...

    ,
  • Metaphysical art
    Metaphysical art
    Metaphysical art , style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. The movement began with Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality...

  • The Stella d’Italia
    The Stella d’Italia
    The Stella d’Italia is the most ancient identity symbol of the Italian land. In modern times it has been associated with the Italia Turrita , the ancient allegorical representation of the Italian peninsula....

    (Star of Italy)

External links

Official site of Giovanni Lista. Ligeia, dossiers sur l’art : Official site of review.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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