Catalogue

What is “emotional geography”? Giuliana Bruno answers this question in her Atlante delle emozioni (Atlas of Emotion): an expert and compelling foray into fields ranging from geography to art, architecture, design, fashion, cartography and cinema, on which she explores a varied and fascinating landscape in a unique attempt to condense the cultural history of visual-spatial arts in a single map. Seeing and travelling are inseparable, the author argues, demonstrating this through an evocative montage of words and images that turn the voyeur into a voyager, also revealing that not only sight and site, but also motion and emotion, are invariably connected. Bruno opens up the world of emotional imagery through artistic movements, historical trajectories  and cultural memories. In doing so she talks about artists such as Gerhard Richter, Annette Messager, Rachel Whiteread and Louise Bourgeois; architects like Daniel Libeskind and Jean Nouvel, and the work of numerous filmmakers including Peter Greenaway and Roberto Rossellini, Chantal Akerman and Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Wim Wenders and Wong Kar-wai. She also discusses the architecture of cinema and its precursors – the cabinet of curiosities, wax museum, anatomical theatre, magic lantern, georama and panorama – garden design, the veduta, the arts of memory and mapping… and, last but not least, her own travels to Italy, the country of her birth. The fascinating and daring visual journey on which Giuliana Bruno is our guide, offers novel views and interpretations at every turn. Atlante delle emozioni is an affective map that puts us in touch with the mental landscapes and inner worlds of what the author calls “emotional geography”, a highly-significant interpretive category taken up by scholars the world over.

Before it was seen as a technology, at its outset photography sprang from a burning desire to capture the images produced in the camera obscura. This desire, which can also be seen in Dürer's work and has roots in the founding legend of art, grew in force between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the romantic redefinition of space, time and subjectivity provided the right conditions for the first concrete achievements in the photographic process, leading to the "official" birth of the medium. As an invention it was heralded by the centuries-long, complex relationship between art and reality, but it is in fact the product of a specific aesthetic, social and cultural milieu. The incentive of industrialized modernity and the advent of mass production prompted the studies of scientists, experimenters and artists from different countries and cultures which culminated in the achievements of Talbot, Niépce, Daguerre, Bayard and other early photographers who were inspired, in parallel and simultaneously, by the desire to capture "the art of nature" by any means. The book reflects on both the origins of photography and its identity: inspired by Foucault's genealogy and the deconstruction of Derrida, Batchen tells the story from a new point of view. Not with the banal aim of deciding who was the first to "invent" the process, but to effect a broader survey that investigates the conception of the very idea of photography, intuiting the richness and complexity of the medium in the often figurative notions and discourse of the early days. Notions and discourse that, like photography, oscillate between nature and culture in challenging, intriguing ways, and are infused with the ambiguities and enduring echoes of a desire that forever changed our way of looking at the world.

This is a story of conversations that never took place and arrested developments; an adventurous tale, never yet fully told, whose protagonists include Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, Charles and Ray Eames and Yona Friedman, Bruno Munari and Frank Lloyd Wright, Giancarlo De Carlo and Ludovico Quaroni, Emilio Ambasz and Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce and Mario Bellini, Michele De Lucchi and Aldo Rossi, Superstudio and Andrea Branzi.  What these diverse players have in common is a deep fascination for film, the medium of the modern age. As the extraordinary art of "seeing space", it is a tool that can be used to explore architecture and describe its principles and volumes from the inside, a device that can be deployed to visualise the contemporary metropolis. Reluctant to embrace the rules of the film industry and grasp the specificity of cinematic language, these architects/directors see the seventh art as a free arena, a terrain to explore without having to pay lip service to customs and rituals, a place for the wildest experiments. Some elements are recurrent: the urgency of their accounts, their critical approach, their desire to recycle existing materials, their visionary momentum and conceptual attitude. While Le Corbusier and De Carlo used moving pictures to bring theoretical reflections already known to scholars and professionals to an audience of non-specialists, others - like Pesce, De Lucchi, Bellini and Branzi - adopted avant-garde models, rejecting the traditional dictates of discourse and the classic canons of communication. Others, like Acconci and Superstudio, use video to stage absurd, impossible projects.In this original book edited by Vincenzo Trione we meet many architects for whom the cinema, in the words of Giulio Carlo Argan, is not just a "pure and simple system of knowledge", but a "newly established system of meaning", the "most structuring" of artistic techniques.

This is the eternal question that the philosopher and critic Arthur C. Danto tackles in an essay that is part philosophical dissertation, part autobiographical musings. Taking his distance from the view that reduces art to what is regarded as such in an institutional context, or those who even consider it to be indefinable, the author identifies various features that can help provide some clear outlines, including the ontological permanence of art, beyond the different forms in which it manifests itself. What makes art art is the ability to lend form to an idea, to express an idea by means of an artistic "modus operandi" that translates thought into matter in the most effective way, bypassing contingencies. But that's not the full story. Art has to embody something intangible: like a daydream, it has to induce a new emotive and sensory state in the viewer. Danto thus arrives at conclusions far removed from the relativism attributed to him for decades: understanding art does not depend on an open concept, but an open mind.Guiding the reader through the big names in philosophy and art of every age (particularly Michelangelo, Poussin, Duchamp and Warhol), the author takes an ambitious path from Platonic and Kantian theory to an analysis of the innovations - perspective, chiaroscuro, physiognomy and the advent of photography - that have shaped Western art, until its apparent burn-out with the arrival of conceptual poetics and the disappearance of aesthetics as a value.As well as exploring fascinating new developments, Che cos'è l'arte? distills the essence of decades of work, and thus represents an ideal introduction to the work of America's greatest visual arts critic.

Woman, artist, outsider, icon: from her groundbreaking debut with Breakfast in fur, which made it into the MOMA when she was just over 20, to her lengthy and difficult quest to be cast off artistic, ideological and gender-related labels, Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) is one of the few female figures in art history famous for challenging time-honoured rules and preconceptions in the name of a genuine vocation.Her life and work were shaped by a radical outlook: no easy path, both in terms of the conformist society of the day, and the inherent sexism that characterised the artistic and literary milieu of her time. Man Ray's revered muse, Breton's irreverent protégé, a party to and exponent of the most radical experiments and most exciting artistic adventures in the twentieth century, Meret Oppenheim was a free spirit with the confidence and at times tormented originality of a natural talent.From her encounter with the theories of Carl Jung to her dazzling engagement with the surrealists; from her long struggle with depression to her magnetic attraction to Max Ernst, aged just 20; from her intense, profound artistic partnership with Alberto Giacometti to her secret and, to date, little known friendship with Marcel Duchamp, Martina Corgnati traces a faithful and intriguing portrait of a woman and artist who, following in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf and Lou Salome and combating the facile stereotypes of an all-female art,  had the courage to shout out to women of every era: "Freedom will not be given to us: we have to take it for ourselves".The volume was produced with the support of Pro Helvetia.

Inaugurated in May 2010 to great public acclaim, and placed in receivership in May 2012 for budgetary imbalances, the MAXXI is currently in the laborious process of getting back on its feet with a different board of directors. This text is a cautionary tale of over-ambitious projects, managerial shortcomings, erratic funding and  political decisions taken without a detailed analysis of costs and benefits for the community. In the incongruous position of being a state-owned museum run by a private foundation, the MAXXI was launched without a clear, convincing cultural raison d'être, compared to similar bodies which boast a greater social utility.Alessandro Monti reconstructs the political and bureaucratic implications of creating a museum "on paper", and the controversial aspects of an administration that had to contend with an excess of competing museum spaces and an unsuitable container: designed by renowned Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid at a cost to the Treasury of over one hundred and eighty million euro, the imposing concrete building has proved to be more spectacular than functional.This in-depth investigation of the MAXXI's crucial issues and weaknesses concludes with a series of possible solutions to the current problems, and various proposals to improve future performance, rethinking the Foundation's strategic priorities and overall game plan in organisational, operational and relational terms. Moving forward, it will be important to ensure greater transparency and get the staff more involved in the management of the museum, as well as taking a more selective approach to the exhibition programme, capitalising above all on the permanent collections and finally making the MAXXI a national landmark.

In the lengthy history of Italian TV art has had a place right from the start: 3 January 1954, when the RAI began broadcasting, was also the date of the first cultural programme, Le avventure dell’arte (The Adventures of Art). And it was indeed an adventure: the outstanding communicative potential of the new medium, which took high culture into many Italian homes for the first time, soon came up against the scepticism, if not downright boycott of a substantial part of critics and intellectuals, as well as a way of navigating the minefield of translating culture from one medium to another.Sixty years on, the scenario and the protagonists of this story are vastly different, with the presence of private broadcasters and pay TV greatly expanding what is on offer, not to mention the switch to digital, and the natural evolution of television language and personalities, including artists and critics. But while the context has changed, the issues regarding the relationship between art and TV remain the same, first and foremost the legitimacy of a popular medium to convey high-brow culture, and the small screen's approach to art, including the various forms of art education which are held to be the main and most obvious use of the medium. This aspect is the focus of the essays gathered in this book, some concerning the specific field of television communication and others focusing on art. Despite these different angles, what comes to the fore is the close relationship between the two most influential visual media of the late 20th century.

Over the centuries, Italy’s historic-artistic heritage has been pilfered of numerous works in a wide variety of genres, giving rise to a flourishing, often illegal market in ancient art. Fortunately, portions of this inheritance have occasionally been brought home through official channels, restoring missing pieces of an immense legacy. This volume focuses on seven Etruscan fresco fragments that today are part of the Lucio and Giovanna Rovati collection, analysing and positioning them within the vast artistic production of Etruria.Silvia Menichelli, a curator, archaeologist and researcher, provides background information on the place of these fragments within Etruscan society and art, and especially painting, the technique that, more than any other, has given us an idea of the history of the Etruscan people. Analysing documents, drawings and watercolour reproductions of ancient works, plus excavation reports, Dr. Menichelli draws parallels to known tomb paintings, determining the historical context of the seven frescos (late-archaic age, datable to approximately 500 BC) and interpreting their iconography, while also pointing to their possible place of origin.The volume includes a preface by Prof. Stephan Steingräber.

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).

In his 'Nuova Pianta di Roma' dated 1748, Giovanni Battista Nolli presented for the first time the Eternal City as a complete organism: divided into twelve tables, the plan reproduces all mechanisms of Rome, showing the external and internal 'spaces' created by removing the solid mass of built-up areas. Almost two hundred fifty years later, in 1978, the project Roma interrotta was concieved by Piero Sartogo and realized and promoted by Incontri Internazionali d'Arte to show how every town planning impulse in Rome was blocked, the 'Pianta' by G.B. Nolli being proof of an interruption that was both culturally and politically motivated. Twelve leading international architects were invited to reflect on the possibility of something grand and lasting that would give an effective modernity and topicality to the Eternal City; a proposal to cancel centuries of inertia and property speculation and restart from the Nolli's plan as the 'last document of coherent urban design'. The historical value of this project, which went on to be featured in prestigious world venues, was restated in 2008 by Aaron Betsky, director of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, who exhibited Roma interrotta at the Artiglierie dell'Arsenale in Venice. In 2013 the original works produced for Roma interrotta, representing an outstanding testament to twentieth-century architectural culture, joined the collections of MAXXI Architettura and are now presented to the public and academics.

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 eccentric Baudelaire with a flamboyant black bow and an immaculate white shirt, the proud and inflexible gaze of the aged Victor Hugo and the magnetic appeal of Sarah Bernhardt in her twenties: there are few who do not know the photographic portraits of Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, more capable than anyone else at capturing the innermost soul of his contemporaries in Paris during the second half of the 19th century. From his birth under the Restoration to his death on the eve of the Great War, Nadar lived for nearly a century as a major public figure. This biography by Stéphanie de Saint Marc reveals the other faces of the great photographer, the embodiment of a “vital paradox with countless nuances”: the turbulent debut that shocked public opinion with the first, pioneering caricatures, contributing to the birth of popular, sensationalistic press; the sudden, rash decisions, as when he dropped everything one morning in March 1848 and marched off with the French army to help free Poland from the Russian invaders; the insatiable thirst for adventure that took him first into the heavens, photographing clouds from a hot-air balloon, and then down into the bowels of the earth, immortalizing the catacombs of Paris by means of artificial lighting; the happy-go-lucky character of a controversial artist who “was on close terms in five minutes and had eight thousand friends” but was at the same time introverted and incapable of balanced relations with those dearest to him. “Able to conquer the air like a bird, as strong as a bull, as agile as a fish at wriggling in anywhere, as mischievous as a monkey and as proudly independent as a stag”, Nadar was all these things together, the observer and interpreter of a modernity that owes him much more than is realized.