Johan & Levi: il punto

In this lucid and concise essay, David Levi Strauss explores the relation between truth and photography. Based on the assumption that "we only need to see in order to believe", Levi Strauss examines the figure of Saint Thomas in the Gospels, investigates the relation between faith and the Holy Shroud – considered by some scholars as the first proto-photographic image in history –, and discusses the contributions to the subject by critics and philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, John Berger and Roland Barthes.A relevant portion of the book is dedicated to the writings of Vilém Flusser and his “technical images” and to the intersection of magic and technology, while the last chapter is a reflection on contemporary times: in a world inhabited by deepfake, how has the relation between faith and photography evolved? Can we still believe images?

After the book Camera straniera, devoted to Giacometti, Marco Belpoliti sets out to explore the life and works of another great artist, Francisco Goya. Analysing a series of drawings, portraits and self portraits, the author retraces Goya’s life and artistic career and unveils clues about his “secret”: the progressive hearing loss that began in the artist’s 30s and ended up completely cutting him off from the outside world around 1792, halfway through his life. This disability greatly influenced his art, and the fantasy elements and chimera that inhabit his works are an eloquent expression of the anguish and despair of his isolation.

This book reconstructs the life and artistic career of the photographer Ghitta Carell (1899-1972). A Hungarian Jew, in 1924 she moved to Italy, where she rapidly became one of the country’s most famous portrait photographers. Exhibiting great determination, Carell entered into contact with Italy’s aristocracy and leading intellectual and political circles. She photographed Maria Jose of Savoy and the Royal Family, and the twentieth century art critic and theorist Margherita Sarfatti. Hers were some of the most famous shots of Benito Mussolini, photographs which made her famous and which remain some of the best known images of Il Duce to this day. In 1938 she experienced the nightmare of anti-Semitism and the war, while the post-war period saw her enter a gradual decline. The story of her life and artistic career possesses a much broader reach than classic accounts of the modern period. While often dismissed as the “photographer of power”, or “of the heart”, Carell’s photography is altogether more refined and complex. Her polished work forges a captivating dialogue that melds the tensions and contrasts between avant-garde tendencies and tradition that animated artistic debate in the Fascist period. Her virtuoso figurative oeuvre is infused with distant, at times contrasting echoes, with shades of Renaissance and Baroque portraiture meeting the nascent aesthetic of Hollywood glamour. Her work awaits the critical acknowledgement that the consummate prowess of her art indubitably merits.

This short essay explores the characteristic use of photographic images in Surrealism between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In particular the Surrealists chose functional images with a documentary or informative purpose, decontextualising them in their art in order to raise questions and unsettle the viewer. The use of these images became a Surrealist gesture in its own right, stimulating the imagination and creating a form of poetry that generates surprise, or the ecstasy so beloved by the Surrealists. This subverts the meaning of the images, lending them added power and connotations that are both artistic and non-artistic.

One of the leading artists of the twentieth century, Alberto Giacometti’s works now fetch a premium at international auctions. His oeuvre addresses multiple themes and spans almost all forms of visual art (drawing, painting and sculpture). In this variegated panorama Marco Belpoliti focuses on a common, very powerful theme in the artist’s work: space. From the circumscribed space inside rooms to that surrounding the artist’s sculptures, especially the large scale creations designed for public areas, Belpoliti is our guide to writings and artworks, declarations and interpretations, family relationships and friendships, exploring not only physical space but also the great artist’s emotional space.

Andy Warhol superstar traces the artist’s activities “on screen”, from his films and adverts to television appearances. This side of his career was what definitively confirmed his superstar status and led to him being both revered and hated to the point of assassination attempts. The book explores his experiences in this sphere and the figures who accompanied him and came to represent an integral part of the Warhol milieu, first and foremost his muse Edie Sedgwick. Theatre expert Luca Scarlini investigates Warhol’s multiple identities: his phobias, contradictions and aspirations regarding his image and the production of works for the small screen and the big screen, against a backdrop of pop culture and camp, the kitsch-dominated scenario of the 60s and 70s.

Fifty years after the first Arte Programmata (Programmed Art) exhibition in Milan, 1962, the author offers a reflection on what remains of a Neo-avant-garde experiment that sought to combine theory of perception with industrial production. Initiated by Bruno Munari, presented by Umberto Eco, and sponsored by Olivetti, Arte Programmata was not only an Italian movement traceable to the broader world of kinetic art. It was also a real attempt to define the field of art in an industrial and urban society, on the basis of the then brand new concept of “programming”. A concept pivotal to the debate among intellectuals linked to Olivetti, then a forerunner in the field of small electronic processors. After a long period of oblivion and silence, Arte Programmata has now found new favour and aroused renewed critical, historical and market interest. Why is this happening? What makes that school still relevant today? What kind of nostalgic movement or revival is it currently triggering? The author’s adroit analysis passes seamlessly from the 1960s to the present, seeking to establish the reasons for this lasting success. At the same time, it investigates  the possibilities of a utopia linked to the concept of “industrial art”, while considering that definition of “art”:  the real reason for the movement’s transcending the half-century that has passed since its birth.

This short essay explores the characteristic use of photographic images in Surrealism between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In particular the Surrealists chose functional images with a documentary or informative purpose, decontextualising them in their art in order to raise questions and unsettle the viewer. The use of these images became a Surrealist gesture in its own right, stimulating the imagination and creating a form of poetry that generates surprise, or the ecstasy so beloved by the Surrealists. This subverts the meaning of the images, lending them added power and connotations that are both artistic and non-artistic.

Federica Sala interviews Michele De Lucchi to investigate his idea of creative act as basis of his work as new as his private life. Sketches taken from Michele De Lucchi scrapbooks illustrate his interdisciplinary approach.

Hyperrealism is usually taken to mean the current in painting that represents reality by starting from a photographic image which is enlarged as much as possible and then drawn, in an attempt to get as close as possible to life-like perception. However the phenomenon has developed in various ways and to date there is no single definition of hyperrealism.Starting from painterly hyperrealism, Rinaldo Censi investigates the characteristics, potential and variety of a cinema that could be termed hyperrealist and that (as in painting) has various different identities. The volume covers two main strands: on one hand it analyses the hyperrealism characterised by satire and social criticism against bourgeois mediocrity (including the works of Hershell Gordon Lewis, John Waters, Bob Clark and Willard Huyck); while on the other it dwells on a more subtle, profound aspect that emerges from a certain vein of experimental cinema, which explores the temporal dimension and encourages us to prioritise the photographic or chronophotographic element (this section includes Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Kenneth Anger and Paul Sharits).

This work in praise of the “funny guy” Francis Picabia as the inventor of Pop Art was born out of the posthumous discovery of a set of twelve ink drawings on paper that he produced in 1923. Intended as covers for André Breton’s literary revue Littérature but never published, the drawings are copies of advertisements taken from magazines and department store brochures complete with the name and price of the article concerned. Picabia added his initials to this simple advertising material, perhaps as an ironic comment on his inability to sell himself and perhaps to play down the failure of his show at the Dalmau gallery in Barcelona, which Breton witnessed. They mark a stylistic and thematic turning point with respect to the artist’s previous projects. Picabia was the first to use marketing material as a strategy of artistic subversion, elevating crude advertising to the status of artwork. He thus invented Pop Art and can be seen as a forerunner of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. The author reconstructs the context and circumstances in which the drawings were produced. The period 1922–23 saw the implosion of the Dada movement and its drift into Surrealism, the publication of Littérature as a forum for the artists and writers involved to air their sometimes conflicting views, the friendship and collaboration between Picabia and Breton, and the journey by car to Barcelona for the show at the Galerie Dalmau preceded by a lecture at the Ateneu Barcelonés. This is not a text for specialists and the author, while addressing a little-known and highly specific part of Picabia’s superabundant and kaleidoscopic oeuvre, succeeds in introducing the ordinary reader to the artist’s universe and the context in which he worked. Lebel is no denigrator of American Pop Art. Picabia’s drawings had yet to be rediscovered and were never seen by Warhol and the other Pop artists. There is thus no suggestion that the Americans “stole” the idea from him. The text is accompanied by a previously unpublished material in the shape of a letter from Picabia to Breton dated 1923 and a drawing of the same year that accompanied it.    

The machine and the star, emblems bequeathed by Duchamp to the second half of the 20th century, provide the basis for three short essays on the theme of inspiration and its intermittency, a crucial point for the modernist tradition that is often overlooked by scholars. Michele Dantini seeks to shed new light on the metaphor of the artist as machine and how the first ready-mades (c. 1913) undermined the creative process as an ordered professional routine that had traditionally characterized the transposition of idea into image. Though liberating in some respects, this revolution also had alarming implications experienced in all their urgency by the Art Informel generation. How to find protection against the discontinuity of inspiration? How to endow interior time with duration if everything boils down to the unrepeatable exceptionality of the instant? Ranging from the American movements of the 1950s to Conceptual Art and Arte Povera, Michele Dantini focuses on three fundamental stages, namely Duchamp’s “monster works”, the flags and the rotating devices of Jasper Johns, and the drawings and embroideries of Arrigo Boetti. The reinvention of the artist’s profession is analyzed step by step: the curious adoption of the ready-made in order to restore plausibility and vigour to traditional techniques; the indefinite dilation of the time of execution: the art of repetition and the creation of satisfying routines (series, catalogues and encyclopaedias) through “automatic” procedures that are impersonal and can even be delegated. It is the task of the “wretched viewers” and their perspicacity to identify continuity in transition within the works, to reconstruct the underlying metaphors and “to interpret a routine suddenly swept clean of recognizable points of reference and techniques”.