Italian modern and contemporary art
Encyclopedia
Italian
Contemporary art
refers to painting and sculpture in Italy from the early 20th century onwards.
, who launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto
in 1909.
The Futurists expressed a loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. They admired speed
, technology
, youth and violence
, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature
, and they were passionate nationalists.
The Futurists practised in every medium of art, including painting
, sculpture
, ceramics
, graphic design
, industrial design
, interior design
, theatre
, film
, fashion
, textiles, literature
, music, architecture
and even gastronomy
.
The leading painters of the movement were Umberto Boccioni
, Carlo Carrà
, Giacomo Balla
and Gino Severini
. They advocated a "universal dynamism", which was to be directly represented in painting. At first they used the techniques of Divisionism
, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, later adopting the methods of Cubism
. In 1912, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate into three dimensions his Futurist ideas.
In 1914, personal quarrels created a rift in Italian Futurism. The outbreak of the First World War in the same year disguised the fact that Italian Futurism had come to an end. Boccioni produced only one war picture and was killed in 1916. Severini painted some significant war pictures in 1915 (e.g. War, Armored Train, and Red Cross Train), but in Paris turned towards Cubism and post-war was associated with the Return to Order
.
After the War, Marinetti revived the movement, seeking to make Futurism the official state art of Fascist
Italy. The main expression of Futurism in painting in the 1930s and early 1940s was Aeropainting (aeropittura
), launched in a manifesto of 1929, Perspectives of Flight, signed by Benedetta Cappa, Fortunato Depero
, Gerardo Dottori
, Fillìa
, Marinetti, Enrico Prampolini
, Somenzi and Tato. The technology and excitement of flight, directly experienced by most aeropainters, offered aeroplanes and aerial landscape
as new subject matter.
Futurism had depended so much on its energetic promotion by Marinetti that his death in 1944 brought the movement to an end. Its association with Italian Fascism meant that most of its artists were shunned in the post-war years, but It has received scholarly attention in recent decades and a major exhibition was launched to coincide with the centenary in 2009.
was an Italian artistic movement founded in Milan
in 1922 by Anselmo Bucci (1887–1955), Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi and Mario Sironi
. Motivated by a post-war “call to order
”, they were brought together by Lino Pesaro, a gallery owner interested in modern art, and Margherita Sarfatti
, a writer and art critic who worked on Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s
newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia
. Sarfatti was also Mussolini’s mistress.
The movement was officially launched in 1923 at an exhibition in Milan, with Mussolini as one of the speakers. After being represented at the Venice Biennale
of 1924, the group split and was reformed. The new Novecento Italiano staged its first group exhibition in Milan in 1926.
Several of the artists were war veterans; Sarfatti had lost a son in the war. The group wished to take on the Italian establishment and create an art associated with the rhetoric of Fascism
. The artists supported the Fascist regime and their work became associated with the state propaganda department, although Mussolini reprimanded Sarfatti for using his name and the name of Fascism to promote Novecento.
The name of the movement (which means 1900s) was a deliberate reference to Italian art in the 15th and 16th centuries. The group rejected European avant garde art and wished to revive the tradition of large format history painting in the classical
manner. It lacked a precise artistic programme and included artists of different styles and temperament, for example, Carrà
and Marini
. It aimed to promote a renewed yet traditional Italian art. Sironi said, “if we look at the painters of the second half of the 19th century, we find that only the revolutionary were great and that the greatest were the most revolutionary”; the artists of Novecento Italiano “would not imitate the world created by God but would be inspired by it”.
, created by Giorgio de Chirico
and Carlo Carrà
. Their dream-like paintings of squares typical of idealized Italian cities, as well as apparently casual juxtapositions of objects, represented a visionary world which engaged most immediately with the unconscious mind
, beyond physical reality, hence the name. The metaphysical movement provided significant impetus for the development of Dada
and Surrealism
.
, Giacomo Manzù
, Nicola Neonato, Pietro Guida, Marcello Mascherini.
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 as the private expression of the individual still had an ethical reason to exist. Italian art critic Germano Celant
organized two exhibitions in 1967 and 1968, followed by an influential book called Arte Povera, promoting the notion of a revolutionary art, free of convention, the power of structure, and the market place. Although Celant attempted to encompass the radical elements of the entire international scene, the term properly centered on a group of Italian artists who attacked the corporate mentality with an art of unconventional materials and style.
The most wide-ranging public collection of works from the Arte Povera movement is at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein
.
is the Italian version of Neo-expressionism
, an art movement that swept through Italy, and the rest of Western Europe, in the late 1970s and 1980s. The term transavantgarde was coined by the Italian art critic, Achille Bonito Oliva
, and literally means beyond the avant-garde
. This art movement rejected conceptual art
, reintroducing emotion―especially joy―back into painting and sculpture. The artists revived figurative art
and symbolism
. The principal transavantgarde artists were Sandro Chia
, Francesco Clemente
, Enzo Cucchi
, Nicola de Maria, Mimmo Paladino
and Remo Salvadori.
Italian interior design in the 1900s was particularly well-known and grew to the heights of class and sophistication. At first, in the early 1900s, Italian furniture designers struggled to create an equal balance between classical elegance and modern creativity, and at first, Italian interior design in the 1910s and 1920s was very similar to that of French art deco styles, using exotic materials and creating sumptuous furniture. However, Italian art deco reached its pinnacle under Gio Ponti
, who made his designs sophisticated, elegant, stylish and raffined, but also modern, exotic and creative. In 1926, a new style of furnishing emerged in Italy, known as "Razionalismo", or "Rationalism". The most successful and famous of the Rationalists were the Gruppo 7, led by Luigi Figini, Gino Pollini
and Giuseppe Terragni
. There styles used tubular steel and was known as being more plain and simple, and almost Fascist in style after c. 1934. After World War II
, however, was the period in which Italy had a true avant-garde in interior design. With the fall of Fascism, rise of Socialism and the 1946 RIMA exhibition, Italian talents in interior decorating were made evident, and with the Italian economic miracle
, Italy saw a growth in industrial production and also mass-made furniture. Yet, the 1960s and 1970s saw Italian interior design reach its pinnacle of stylishness, and by that point, with Pop and post-modern interiors, the phrases "Bel Designo" and "Linea Italiana" entered the vocabulary of furniture design.
Michelangelo Pistoletto
began painting on mirrors in 1962, connecting painting with the constantly changing realities in which the work finds itself. In the later sixties he began bringing together rags with casts of omnipresent classical statuary of Italy to break down the hierarchies of "art" and common things. An art of impoverished materials is certainly one aspect of the definition of Arte Povera. In his 1967 Muretto di straci (Rag Wall) Pistoletto makes an exotic and opulent tapestry wrapping common bricks in discarded scraps of fabric.
Artists such as Jannis Kounellis
and Mario Merz
attempted to make the experience of art more immediately real while also more closely connecting the individual to nature.
The leading sculptors from 1930-40 to 2000 included Marino Marini
, Emilio Greco, Pino Pascali
, Mario Ceroli, Giovanni e Arnaldo Pomodoro, Umberto Mastroianni
, Ettore Colla.
The leading painters from 1930-40 to 2000 included Alberto Savinio
, Antonio Donghi
, Giorgio Morandi
, Alberto Magnelli
, Elio Carletti
, Felice Casorati
, Roberto Melli, Corrado Cagli
, Gianfilippo Usellini, Pietro Annigoni
, Renato Guttuso
, Lucio Fontana
, Giovanni Capogrossi, Enrico Accatino, Oreste Carpi
, Fausto Pirandello
, Afro Basaldella
, Alberto Burri
, Mimmo Rotella
, Franco Nonnis, Domenico Gnoli, Piero Manzoni
, Emilio Tadini, Salvatore Provino, Mino Argento
.
A new breed of contemporary italian artist such as Gaspare Manos
are developing a more global language that draws on a vast international personal experience of life and culture stretching over several continents and many decades of travel. Such artist think locally and act globally. An equivalent in Spain for example is the painter Miguel Barcelo'.
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
Contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
refers to painting and sculpture in Italy from the early 20th century onwards.
Futurism
The founder and most influential personality of Futurism was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso MarinettiFilippo 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:...
, who launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto
Futurist Manifesto
The Futurist Manifesto, written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was published in the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dell'Emilia in Bologna on 5 February 1909, then in French as "Manifeste du futurisme" in the newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909...
in 1909.
The Futurists expressed a loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. They admired speed
Speed
In kinematics, the speed of an object is the magnitude of its velocity ; it is thus a scalar quantity. The average speed of an object in an interval of time is the distance traveled by the object divided by the duration of the interval; the instantaneous speed is the limit of the average speed as...
, technology
Technology
Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...
, youth and violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
, and they were passionate nationalists.
The Futurists practised in every medium of art, including painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, sculpture
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
, ceramics
Ceramic art
In art history, ceramics and ceramic art mean art objects such as figures, tiles, and tableware made from clay and other raw materials by the process of pottery. Some ceramic products are regarded as fine art, while others are regarded as decorative, industrial or applied art objects, or as...
, graphic design
Graphic design
Graphic design is a creative process – most often involving a client and a designer and usually completed in conjunction with producers of form – undertaken in order to convey a specific message to a targeted audience...
, industrial design
Industrial design
Industrial design is the use of a combination of applied art and applied science to improve the aesthetics, ergonomics, and usability of a product, but it may also be used to improve the product's marketability and production...
, interior design
Interior design
Interior design describes a group of various yet related projects that involve turning an interior space into an effective setting for the range of human activities are to take place there. An interior designer is someone who conducts such projects...
, theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
, film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, fashion
Fashion
Fashion, a general term for a currently popular style or practice, especially in clothing, foot wear, or accessories. Fashion references to anything that is the current trend in look and dress up of a person...
, textiles, literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, music, architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
and even gastronomy
Futurist meals
Futurist meals comprised a cuisine and style of dining advocated by some members of the Futurist movement, particularly in Italy. These meals were first proposed in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillia's Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, published in the Turin Gazzetta del Popolo on December 28,...
.
The leading painters of the movement were 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:...
, Carlo Carrà
Carlo Carrà
Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter, a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.-Biography:Carrà was born in...
, 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....
and Gino Severini
Gino Severini
Gino Severini , was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. He was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War. During his career he worked in a variety of...
. They advocated a "universal dynamism", which was to be directly represented in painting. At first they used the techniques of Divisionism
Divisionism
Divisionism was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches which interacted optically....
, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, later adopting the methods of Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
. In 1912, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate into three dimensions his Futurist ideas.
In 1914, personal quarrels created a rift in Italian Futurism. The outbreak of the First World War in the same year disguised the fact that Italian Futurism had come to an end. Boccioni produced only one war picture and was killed in 1916. Severini painted some significant war pictures in 1915 (e.g. War, Armored Train, and Red Cross Train), but in Paris turned towards Cubism and post-war was associated with the Return to Order
Return to order
The return to order was a European art movement that followed the First World War, rejecting the extreme avant-garde art of the years up to 1918 and taking its inspiration from traditional art instead. The movement was a reaction to the War...
.
After the War, Marinetti revived the movement, seeking to make Futurism the official state art of Fascist
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
Italy. The main expression of Futurism in painting in the 1930s and early 1940s was Aeropainting (aeropittura
Aeropittura
Aeropittura was a major expression of the second generation of Italian Futurism, from 1929 through the early 1940s. The technology and excitement of flight, directly experienced by most aeropainters, offered aeroplanes and aerial landscape as new subject matter.Aeropainting was surprisingly...
), launched in a manifesto of 1929, Perspectives of Flight, signed by Benedetta Cappa, Fortunato Depero
Fortunato Depero
Fortunato Depero was an Italian futurist painter, writer, sculptor and graphic designer.Although born in Fondo/Malosco , Depero grew up in Rovereto and it was here he first began exhibiting his works, while serving as an apprentice to a marble worker...
, Gerardo Dottori
Gerardo Dottori
Gerardo Dottori was an Italian Futurist painter. He signed the Futurist Manifesto of Aeropainting in 1929...
, Fillìa
Fillìa
Fillìa was the name adopted by Luigi Colombo, an Italian artist associated with the second generation of Futurism.-Biography:Fillìa was born in Revello, Piedmont....
, Marinetti, 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....
, Somenzi and Tato. The technology and excitement of flight, directly experienced by most aeropainters, offered aeroplanes and aerial landscape
Aerial landscape art
Aerial landscape art includes paintings and other visual arts which depict or evoke the appearance of a landscape from a perspective above it—usually from a considerable distance—as it might be viewed from an aircraft or spacecraft. Sometimes the art is based not on direct observation but on aerial...
as new subject matter.
Futurism had depended so much on its energetic promotion by Marinetti that his death in 1944 brought the movement to an end. Its association with Italian Fascism meant that most of its artists were shunned in the post-war years, but It has received scholarly attention in recent decades and a major exhibition was launched to coincide with the centenary in 2009.
Novecento Italiano
Novecento ItalianoNovecento Italiano
Novecento Italiano was an Italian artistic movement founded in Milan in 1922 by Anselmo Bucci , Leonardo Dudreville , Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba , Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi and Mario Sironi...
was an Italian artistic movement founded in Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
in 1922 by Anselmo Bucci (1887–1955), Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi and Mario Sironi
Mario Sironi
Mario Sironi was an Italian modernist artist who was active as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and designer. His typically somber paintings are characterized by massive, immobile forms.-Biography:...
. Motivated by a post-war “call to order
Return to order
The return to order was a European art movement that followed the First World War, rejecting the extreme avant-garde art of the years up to 1918 and taking its inspiration from traditional art instead. The movement was a reaction to the War...
”, they were brought together by Lino Pesaro, a gallery owner interested in modern art, and Margherita Sarfatti
Margherita Sarfatti
Margherita Sarfatti was a Jewish Italian journalist, art critic, patron, collector, socialite, and one of Benito Mussolini's mistresses.-Biography:...
, a writer and art critic who worked on Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia
Il Popolo d'Italia
Il Popolo d'Italia , was an Italian newspaper founded by Benito Mussolini on November 15, 1914, as a result of his split with the Italian Socialist Party. Il Popolo d'Italia ran until July 24, 1943 and became the foundation for the Fascist movement in Italy after World War I...
. Sarfatti was also Mussolini’s mistress.
The movement was officially launched in 1923 at an exhibition in Milan, with Mussolini as one of the speakers. After being represented at the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
of 1924, the group split and was reformed. The new Novecento Italiano staged its first group exhibition in Milan in 1926.
Several of the artists were war veterans; Sarfatti had lost a son in the war. The group wished to take on the Italian establishment and create an art associated with the rhetoric of Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
. The artists supported the Fascist regime and their work became associated with the state propaganda department, although Mussolini reprimanded Sarfatti for using his name and the name of Fascism to promote Novecento.
The name of the movement (which means 1900s) was a deliberate reference to Italian art in the 15th and 16th centuries. The group rejected European avant garde art and wished to revive the tradition of large format history painting in the classical
Classicism
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
manner. It lacked a precise artistic programme and included artists of different styles and temperament, for example, Carrà
Carlo Carrà
Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter, a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.-Biography:Carrà was born in...
and Marini
Marino Marini
Marino Marini was an Italian sculptor. -Biography:He attended the Accademia Di Belle Arti in Florence in 1917. Although he never abandoned painting, Marini devoted himself primarily to sculpture from about 1922. From this time his work was influenced by Etruscan art and the sculpture of Arturo...
. It aimed to promote a renewed yet traditional Italian art. Sironi said, “if we look at the painters of the second half of the 19th century, we find that only the revolutionary were great and that the greatest were the most revolutionary”; the artists of Novecento Italiano “would not imitate the world created by God but would be inspired by it”.
Metaphysical art
Metaphysical art is the name of an Italian art movementArt movement
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...
, created by 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...
and Carlo Carrà
Carlo Carrà
Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter, a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.-Biography:Carrà was born in...
. Their dream-like paintings of squares typical of idealized Italian cities, as well as apparently casual juxtapositions of objects, represented a visionary world which engaged most immediately with the unconscious mind
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
, beyond physical reality, hence the name. The metaphysical movement provided significant impetus for the development of 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...
and Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
.
Classical modernism of the 20th century
At the beginning of the 20th century, Italian sculptors and painters joined the rest of Western Europe in the revitalization of a simpler, more vigorous, less sentimental Classical tradition, that was applied in liturgical as well as decorative and political settings. The leading sculptors included: Libero Andreotti, Arturo MartiniArturo Martini
Arturo Martini was a leading Italian sculptor between World War I and II. He moved between a very vigorous classicism and modernism. He was associated with public sculpture in fascist Italy, but later renounced his medium altogether.-Futurism:Martini seems to have been an active supporter of the...
, Giacomo Manzù
Giacomo Manzù
Giacomo Manzù, pseudonym of Giacomo Manzoni , was an Italian sculptor, communist, and Roman Catholic.-Biography:...
, Nicola Neonato, Pietro Guida, Marcello Mascherini.
Arte povera
The term Arte PoveraArte 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...
was introduced in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s
1960s
The 1960s was the decade that started on January 1, 1960, and ended on December 31, 1969. It was the seventh decade of the 20th century.The 1960s term also refers to an era more often called The Sixties, denoting the complex of inter-related cultural and political trends across the globe...
, when artists were taking a radical
Political radicalism
The term political radicalism denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means and changing value systems in fundamental ways...
stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether art as the private expression of the individual still had an ethical reason to exist. Italian art critic Germano Celant
Germano Celant
Germano Celant is an Italian art historian, critic and curator, mostly renewed for being one of the founding members of the "Arte Povera" movement in 1967....
organized two exhibitions in 1967 and 1968, followed by an influential book called Arte Povera, promoting the notion of a revolutionary art, free of convention, the power of structure, and the market place. Although Celant attempted to encompass the radical elements of the entire international scene, the term properly centered on a group of Italian artists who attacked the corporate mentality with an art of unconventional materials and style.
The most wide-ranging public collection of works from the Arte Povera movement is at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein
The Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein is the state museum of modern and contemporary art in Vaduz. The building by the Swiss architects Meinrad Morger, Heinrich Degelo and Christian Kerez was completed in November 2000...
.
Transavantgarde
TransavantgardeTransavantgarde
Transavantgarde is the Italian version of Neo-expressionism, an art movement that swept through Italy, and the rest of Western Europe, in the late 1970s and 1980s. The term transavantgarde was coined by the Italian art critic, Achille Bonito Oliva, and literally means beyond the avant-garde...
is the Italian version of Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
, an art movement that swept through Italy, and the rest of Western Europe, in the late 1970s and 1980s. The term transavantgarde was coined by the Italian art critic, Achille Bonito Oliva
Achille Bonito Oliva
Achille Bonito Oliva, is a recognized and respected Italian contemporary art critic, author of many essays on mannerism, and a professor of History of Contemporary Art at La Sapienza University in Rome...
, and literally means beyond the 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....
. This art movement rejected conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
, reintroducing emotion―especially joy―back into painting and sculpture. The artists revived figurative art
Figurative art
Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.-Definition:...
and symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
. The principal transavantgarde artists were Sandro Chia
Sandro Chia
Sandro Chia is an Italian painter and sculptor.A native of Florence, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Enzo Cucchi....
, Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical.Dividing his time...
, Enzo Cucchi
Enzo Cucchi
Enzo Cucchi is an Italian painter. A native of Morro d'Alba, province of Ancona, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Sandro Chia...
, Nicola de Maria, Mimmo Paladino
Mimmo Paladino
Mimmo Paladino is an Italian sculptor, painter and printmaker.-Paintings and drawing:Mimmo Paladino was born Domenico Paladino in Paduli, Campania, southern Italy...
and Remo Salvadori.
Interior design
Giò Ponti
Gio Ponti was one of the most important Italian architects, industrial designers, furniture designers, artists, and publishers of the twentieth century.-Early life:...
, who made his designs sophisticated, elegant, stylish and raffined, but also modern, exotic and creative. In 1926, a new style of furnishing emerged in Italy, known as "Razionalismo", or "Rationalism". The most successful and famous of the Rationalists were the Gruppo 7, led by Luigi Figini, Gino Pollini
Gino Pollini
Gino Pollini was an Italian architect. He was the father of classical pianist Maurizio Pollini. Pollini worked together with Luigi Figini since 1929. He also taught architecture in Milan and Palermo....
and Giuseppe Terragni
Giuseppe Terragni
Giuseppe Terragni was an Italian architect who worked primarily under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and pioneered the Italian modern movement under the rubric of Rationalism...
. There styles used tubular steel and was known as being more plain and simple, and almost Fascist in style after c. 1934. After World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, however, was the period in which Italy had a true avant-garde in interior design. With the fall of Fascism, rise of Socialism and the 1946 RIMA exhibition, Italian talents in interior decorating were made evident, and with the Italian economic miracle
Italian economic miracle
The Italian economic miracle is the name often used by historians, economists and mass media to designate the prolonged period of sustained economic growth in Italy comprised between the end of World War II and the late 1960s, and in particular the years 1950-63...
, Italy saw a growth in industrial production and also mass-made furniture. Yet, the 1960s and 1970s saw Italian interior design reach its pinnacle of stylishness, and by that point, with Pop and post-modern interiors, the phrases "Bel Designo" and "Linea Italiana" entered the vocabulary of furniture design.
Artists
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera...
began painting on mirrors in 1962, connecting painting with the constantly changing realities in which the work finds itself. In the later sixties he began bringing together rags with casts of omnipresent classical statuary of Italy to break down the hierarchies of "art" and common things. An art of impoverished materials is certainly one aspect of the definition of Arte Povera. In his 1967 Muretto di straci (Rag Wall) Pistoletto makes an exotic and opulent tapestry wrapping common bricks in discarded scraps of fabric.
Artists such as Jannis Kounellis
Jannis Kounellis
Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. He studied in art college in Athens until 1956 and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome....
and Mario Merz
Mario Merz
Mario Merz was an Italian artist, and husband of Marisa Merz.-Life:Born in Milan, Merz started drawing during World War II, when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Giustizia e Libertà antifascist group. He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke–not removing his pencil point from...
attempted to make the experience of art more immediately real while also more closely connecting the individual to nature.
The leading sculptors from 1930-40 to 2000 included Marino Marini
Marino Marini
Marino Marini was an Italian sculptor. -Biography:He attended the Accademia Di Belle Arti in Florence in 1917. Although he never abandoned painting, Marini devoted himself primarily to sculpture from about 1922. From this time his work was influenced by Etruscan art and the sculpture of Arturo...
, Emilio Greco, Pino Pascali
Pino Pascali
Pino Pascali was an Italian artist, sculptor, set designer and performer.-Biography:Pino Pascali was born in Bari, Italy in 1936 and moved to Rome in 1955 to learn scene painting and set design at the Academy of Art...
, Mario Ceroli, Giovanni e Arnaldo Pomodoro, Umberto Mastroianni
Umberto Mastroianni
Umberto Mastroianni , was an Italian abstract sculptor. In 1989, he received the first Praemium Imperiale for sculpture. During World War II, he was in the Italian resistance movement.He was the uncle of the actor Marcello Mastroianni....
, Ettore Colla.
The leading painters from 1930-40 to 2000 included Alberto Savinio
Alberto Savinio
Alberto Savinio, real name Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico was an Italian writer, painter, musician, journalist, essayist, playwright, set designer and composer. He was the younger brother of 'metaphysical' painter Giorgio De Chirico...
, Antonio Donghi
Antonio Donghi
Antonio Donghi was an Italian painter of scenes of popular life, landscapes, and still life.-Biography:Born in Rome, he studied at the Instituto di Belle Arti...
, Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still life. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting apparently simple subjects, which were limited mainly to vases, bottles, bowls, flowers, and landscapes.-Biography:Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna...
, Alberto Magnelli
Alberto Magnelli
Alberto Magnelli was an Italian modern painter who was a significant figure in the post war Concrete art movement.- Biography :...
, Elio Carletti
Elio Carletti
Elio Carletti was an Italian impressionist artist.He was also an inspector for the Italian police. Information and history from the book by Pino Amatiello - Pino Amatiello died February 10, 2007. He was a poet, art historian and journalist.Scenes of the Italian countryside and village life were...
, Felice Casorati
Felice Casorati
Felice Casorati was an Italian painter, sculptor, and printmaker. The paintings for which he is most noted include figure compositions, portraits and still lifes, which are often distinguished by unusual perspective effects.-Life and work:Casorati was born in Novara and showed an early interest in...
, Roberto Melli, Corrado Cagli
Corrado Cagli
Corrado Cagli was an Italian painter of Jewish heritage, who lived in the USA during World War II.Cagli was born in Ancona, but in 1915 moved with his family to Rome....
, Gianfilippo Usellini, Pietro Annigoni
Pietro Annigoni
Pietro Annigoni was an Italian portrait and fresco painter, who became world famous after painting Queen Elizabeth II in 1956.-Life:Born in Milan in 1910, Annigoni was a painter who was influenced by the Italian Renaissance....
, Renato Guttuso
Renato Guttuso
Renato Guttuso was an Italian painter.His best-known paintings include Flight from Etna , Crucifixion and La Vucciria . Guttuso also designed for the theatre and did illustrations for books...
, 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:...
, Giovanni Capogrossi, Enrico Accatino, Oreste Carpi
Oreste Carpi
Oreste Carpi was an Italian deaf painter, engraver and ceramist.-Biography:Oreste Carpi was born in Poviglio, near Reggio Emilia, and received early training in painting at "Paolo Toschi" art school in Parma....
, Fausto Pirandello
Fausto Pirandello
Fausto Pirandello , was an Italian painter belonging to the modern movement of the Scuola romana . He was the son of Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello.-Biography:...
, Afro Basaldella
Afro Basaldella
Afro Basaldella was an Italian painter and a member of the Scuola Romana. He was generally known by the single name Afro....
, 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....
, Mimmo Rotella
Mimmo Rotella
Domenico "Mimmo" Rotella, , was an Italian artist and poet best known for his works of décollage and psychogeographics, made from torn advertising posters.Rotella was born in Catanzaro, Calabria....
, Franco Nonnis, Domenico Gnoli, Piero Manzoni
Piero Manzoni
Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist best known for his ironic conceptual art. Influenced by the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera...
, Emilio Tadini, Salvatore Provino, Mino Argento
Mino Argento
Mino Argento is an Italian artist, whose works comprise abstract paintings on canvas and paper.-Life and work:Mino Argento was born in Rome, Italy in 1927. He worked in architecture as a young man...
.
A new breed of contemporary italian artist such as Gaspare Manos
Gaspare Manos
Gaspare Manos is an Italian painter and sculptor. His work traces the boundary between abstraction and figurative art.-Education:Gaspare Manos was educated in Greece, Switzerland and Britain...
are developing a more global language that draws on a vast international personal experience of life and culture stretching over several continents and many decades of travel. Such artist think locally and act globally. An equivalent in Spain for example is the painter Miguel Barcelo'.