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Lo scolabottiglie di Duchamp
In 1914, shortly before leaving for New York, Marcel Duchamp made a disruptive gesture: elevating a bottle rack to the status of a work of art through the mere selection of that object and its subsequent transfer to the ‘sacred perimeter’ of his studio. This action inaugurates the practice of readymades, industrial, everyday products to which the artist arbitrarily assigns the status of works of art, openly and ironically challenging the idea of the artist faber.The Scolabottiglie thus becomes a historical precedent that allows Ermanno Migliorini to carry out, on the one hand, an acute and far-sighted analysis of international art in the second half of the 20th century, identifying the challenges posed by the neo-avant-gardes indebted to Duchamp's iconoclastic attitude; on the other hand, he illuminates the problems that the drifts of this gesture cause to the ‘aesthetic edifice’ and to art critics unprepared to deal with it. In this fundamental essay from 1970, an attempt is made to clarify, through the lens of analytical philosophy, the general significance of Duchamp's operation and the statements that accompany it insofar as they highlight the dissociation between the artistic procedure and traditional evaluative structures. The claim to ‘propose value without bringing reasons’ has contributed to profoundly marking the direction in which much of the art of our time is moving. A direction that in the background finds, if not exactly the Scolabottiglie or another readymade, something that looks very much like it, namely something linked to the plane of unmotivated and unmovable sensitive experiences.
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Lo scolabottiglie di Duchamp

Ermanno Migliorini

pages: 144 pages

In 1914, shortly before leaving for New York, Marcel Duchamp made a disruptive gesture: elevating a bottle rack to the status of a work of art through the mere selection of that object and its subsequent transfer to the ‘sacred perimeter’ of his studio. This action inaugurates the practice of readymades, industrial, everyday products to which t
Marianna Kennedy. As above, so below
Bilingual edition Ita/EngMarianna Kennedy has been working for over twenty-five years in her London home-studio creating a limited number of artistic design pieces, each the result of months of collaboration with Britain's finest craftsmen. In her creative practice, the use of traditional techniques has always coexisted with a highly contemporary aesthetic vision. Known and appreciated internationally, her work has become part of prestigious private collections. This publication is dedicated to the site-specific work created for the Luigi Rovati Foundation Art Museum, and is part of a new series of monographs on important contemporary artists who have collaborated with the Foundation. As Above So Below is a mirror consisting of thirty-eight individual pieces with a distinctive pinkish hue, mounted within a rich, floral decorated frame of carved wood. Representing the cycle of nature, the bottom part of the mirror reproduces the material world, with rocks and caves, while the plant elements that furrow its surface symbolize the ascent to the spiritual world, to light, to infinity. Interviewed by Ben Weaver, Kennedy traces the history of the commission of the large mirror, from the original inspiration to its evolution, listing all the craftsmen involved. The publication is enriched by an essay by Dan Cruickshank on the history of British carving in 18th-century architecture and decorative arts, the differences with Continental carving, and the legacy of that practice, which is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Kennedy.
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Marianna Kennedy. As above, so below

Dan Cruickshank, Marianna Kennedy, Ben Weaver

pages: 76

Bilingual edition Ita/EngMarianna Kennedy has been working for over twenty-five years in her London home-studio creating a limited number of artistic design pieces, each the result of months of collaboration with Britain's finest craftsmen. In her creative practice, the use of traditional techniques has always coexisted with a highly contemporary a
Louvre, mon amour - Undici grandi artisti in visita al museo più famoso del mondo
Do you have to set the Louvre on fire to establish yourself as one of the masters of your time? In order to answer this provocative question, in the 1960s the art critic Pierre Schneider invited eleven celebrated artists of the day, including Giacometti, Miró, Chagall and Steinberg, to accompany him one at a time through the museum’s sumptuous rooms. None of them refused the invitation and the truth that emerged still holds today. Far from torturing artists, the Louvre casts a spell on them that does not fade over time. Neither discouraged nor uplifted but if anything beguiled by the abyss separating them from the giants that live there, artists alone are capable of addressing them and entering into a dialogue between equals. Schneider records their every comment and gesture, even their silences and alternating moods, outlining the direction of their thinking in a few lines. Then, at just the right moment, comes the insidious question. The answers, sometimes scathing and sometimes admiring but never deferential, reveal uncommon acumen and great intimacy also with artists of a very different nature. We thus find Chagall unforeseeably moved by Courbet (“a great poet”) and irritated with Ingres (“too polished”), Giacometti enamoured of the Tintoretto self-portrait (“the most magnificent head in the Louvre”), and Miró onomatopoeically entranced, whistling with admiration at African mosaics. The eye of each glides over the works to plumb their material depths, comment on their “chemistry” and finally decide how they have stood up over time. These fascinating walks are informed by a spirit of reconciliation between old and new that explodes any notion of the museum as a warehouse of obsolete objects with nothing to say to contemporaries. The Louvre appears to its eleven extraordinary guests as a book from which you learn to read, a gymnasium to build up your strength, a school to hone your vision, the ideal cemetery, a time machine that eliminates millennial gaps, a bridge between past and present and above all the place where it is possible to address the greatest things created since the beginning of time.
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Louvre, mon amour

Undici grandi artisti in visita al museo più famoso del mondo

Pierre Schneider

pages: 192 pages

Do you have to set the Louvre on fire to establish yourself as one of the masters of your time? In order to answer this provocative question, in the 1960s the art critic Pierre Schneider invited eleven celebrated artists of the day, including Giacometti, Miró, Chagall and Steinberg, to accompany him one at a time through the museum’s sumptuous r
Hitler e il potere dell’estetica
Countless books have been written on Adolf Hitler. When CBS announced its intention of producing a film on his youth years ago, the almost unanimous chorus of protest that ensued can be summarised as saying: “We know who he was and what he did. What else is there to know?” Frederic Spotts offers a completely unprecedented view of Hitler and the Third Reich in a surprising examination of the Führer’s aims and huge machinery he built up around him. The key role of culture in his vision of the Arian super state has seldom been addressed. It was not the end to which power should aspire but a means to obtain it. From the spectacular mass rallies in Nuremberg to the imposing architectural works, from the musical festivals and his tormented relationship with Wagner to the policies of cleansing, from his own watercolours to the dream of opening an enormous art gallery in Linz: the artist manqué thus succeeded in expressing his talent by mesmerizing Germany and most of Europe. The only enemy that Hitler would not have imprisoned once the fighting was over but “left living comfortably in a fortress with permission to write his memoirs and paint” was Winston Churchill, the British officer who painted the ruins of a village during the Great War while Hitler immortalized a church on the other side of the river. Carl Burckhardt, the commissioner of the League of Nations in Danzig who met the Führer twice in 1939, was therefore probably right to suggest that the dictator had a split personality: “the rather gentle artist” on the one hand and “the homicidal maniac” on the other. For obvious reasons, writers have concentrated on the homicidal maniac for over fifty years now. While in no way wishing to ignore the second Hitler, Spotts addresses the first.
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Hitler e il potere dell’estetica

Frederic Spotts

pages: 480 pages

Countless books have been written on Adolf Hitler. When CBS announced its intention of producing a film on his youth years ago, the almost unanimous chorus of protest that ensued can be summarised as saying: “We know who he was and what he did. What else is there to know?” Frederic Spotts offers a completely unprecedented view of Hitler and th
Nonumento - Un paradosso della memoria
We entrust our memories to monuments so that they might preserve them for us. Hence we can afford to forget them. This is the paradox of the memorial: built as an aid to remembrance, it becomes the opposite, a machine of forgetting. Contemporary monumental art has racked its brains to find a remedy for this pathology. The 1960s saw the formation of a heterogeneous, often radical and contradictory movement of artists involved in the design of “counter-monuments” or “anti-monuments”.   Devices that use negative means to make us profoundly question our paradoxical relationship with memory and forgetting.  Andrea Pinotti borrows Gordon Matta-Clark’s term “non-uments”, which he translates as nonumenti, of which he offers both a grammar and typology. But does the “non-ument” really do any better than the monument? Does a parallelepiped or a fountain that disappears into the ground really help our forgetfulness more than a proudly erect, stubbornly vertical obelisk or column? Does a performance or reenactment lasting a few minutes or hours do a better job than a mausoleum firmly planted where it has stood for centuries? Do air, light, colours and bits truly save us from amnesia more than stone, bronze or iron? Today these questions have become more pressing than ever: the memorial is a red hot issue again, just when efforts are being made in several quarters to demolish as many as possible. At a time when statues are being dumped in landfills as a consequence of the wave of iconoclastic violence inspired by cancel or woke culture, this book proposes an aesthetic and political reflection on contemporary monumental art and the contradiction that besets it: denying the monument, in order to reaffirm it, and making the “non-ument”.
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Nonumento

Un paradosso della memoria

Andrea Pinotti

pages: 320 pages

We entrust our memories to monuments so that they might preserve them for us. Hence we can afford to forget them. This is the paradox of the memorial: built as an aid to remembrance, it becomes the opposite, a machine of forgetting. Contemporary monumental art has racked its brains to find a remedy for this pathology. The 1960s saw the formation of
Vestire all'etrusca
Judging by the variety of garments depicted in fine detail in Etruscan art, we are dealing with a people subject to multiple cultural influences, also as regards fashion. So much so that, if an “Etruscan style” existed, it would be impossible to imagine it outside the context of trade relations and frequent exchanges between Mediterranean and Near Eastern peoples. This is the case with the variations on the chiton, a garment of Greek origin, but also with hairstyles like the long plait worn down the back, of Oriental derivation, or the tutulus imported from Greece, but interpreted according to typical local forms. Larissa Bonfante seeks to identify the most indigenous features of Etruscan fashion by conducting a multifaceted analysis of its development from the 8th to the 5th century BCE. She does this with the aid of a rich iconography that follows the evolution of individual garments, footwear, ornaments and hairstyles, about which written sources yield little information. It is through artists that we know about the Etruscans’ fondness for luxury that led them to adorn themselves with jewelry and accessories; their custom of wearing tailor-made clothes as opposed to the loose, flowing garments worn by the Greeks, and their reluctance to embrace the nudity favoured by the latter.  But also their fondness for a wide range of hats in contrast to the Greek custom of going bareheaded, and the female custom of wearing clothing that elsewhere was reserved for men, such as the semicircular tebenna, the short mantle that could even be worn back to front, and footwear with laces. This custom reflected the freedom enjoyed by women in Etruscan public life and society, compared to those in other coeval civilizations. For Bonfante, clothing becomes an important historical document for dating finds and attributing a gender, a social rank, and even a name to the figures depicted. Although Etruscan fashion reflected the assimilation of Greek and Near Eastern models that were then transmitted to the Roman world, this still left room for the development of a specifically Etruscan style.
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Vestire all'etrusca

Larissa Bonfante

pages: 304 pagine

Judging by the variety of garments depicted in fine detail in Etruscan art, we are dealing with a people subject to multiple cultural influences, also as regards fashion. So much so that, if an “Etruscan style” existed, it would be impossible to imagine it outside the context of trade relations and frequent exchanges between Mediterranean and N

Sul design

Anni Albers

pages: 128 pagine

At Black Mountain College, the experimental school in North Carolina that had welcomed the Albers fleeing Nazism, Anni would tell her students: “We have to go where no one was before us.” A bold attitude that did not stop her from looking back over things to gauge the progress made in the arts and design. Only by knowing exactly where we stand
Diego, the other Giacometti
An untiring assistant and patient model, Diego Giacometti shared 40 years of life and work with his brother Alberto, in what was one of the most intense symbiotic relationships in the history of modern art. Diego’s creative career embraced sculpture and design, and his approach to the art of decoration was extremely personal. The furniture and objects he made  possessed a spare, severe, elegance, which was embellished by subtle references to past civilizations, starting with that of the Etruscans, and offset by the bronze he favoured. His instinctive liking for animals led him to portray them often, also in furniture, where they were not simply ornamental elements.  Indeed, they transformed the actual structure of the object, enlivened the internal volumes and made them even lighter and more airy, evoking the essential lines of a landscape. Diego shared these concepts with the famous interior decorator Jean-Michel Frank, with whom he worked on several occasions. As well as receiving many private commissions, Diego was invited to create projects for public institutions, from his work for the Musée National Marc Chagall to the decoration for the new Musée Picasso in Paris at the age of eighty, which definitively, and posthumously, consecrated him as an artist. In this catalogue, published on the occasion of the first Italian exhibition on Diego Giacometti at the Fondazione Luigi Rovati, curator Casimiro Di Crescenzo traces a biographical profile of the artist, sheds light on several aspects of the Giacometti brothers’ life in Paris, clarifies certain facts, and unearths interesting new information, also in Diego’s correspondence with family members. The four texts introducing the sections of works describe the main thematic nuclei of Diego’s production (sculpture, furniture, objects, depictions of animals), as well as his aforementioned role as a model for others, his father, and especially Alberto. The catalogue is enriched with essays by Roger Montandon, Eberhard W. Kornfeld and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
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Diego, the other Giacometti

pages: 224 pages

An untiring assistant and patient model, Diego Giacometti shared 40 years of life and work with his brother Alberto, in what was one of the most intense symbiotic relationships in the history of modern art. Diego’s creative career embraced sculpture and design, and his approach to the art of decoration was extremely personal. The furniture and ob

Autobiografia

Gian Francesco Gamurrini

pages: 128 pagine

Gian Francesco Gamurrini’s Autobiografia – written at the age of 86 – traces key moments in an entire life dedicated to archaeology and to protecting the cultural  heritage of the Arezzo area from plundering by speculators and art dealers, especially after the suppression of ecclesiastical bodies. This was a threat to be avoided at all costs

Fondazione Luigi Rovati

Art Museum

pages: 136

With texts by Lucio Rovati, Giovanna Forlanelli, Salvatore Settis, Mario Abis, Mario Cucinella, Giulio Paolucci and Martina Corgnati.The volume describes the genesis and operating principles of both the Fondazione Luigi Rovati, a material and immaterial infrastructure of the knowledge society, and the Museo d’arte in the Foundation’s headquarte

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