Catalogue

Giorgio Soavi goes hunting for art with an eager, avid gaze. As a viewer with an insatiable appetite he devours paintings, drawings and sculptures as if they were gourmet dishes, savouring every single ingredient. And if he often pairs eye and palate, it’s because he sees art and its products like an animal sees and devours the food it needs to survive. A writer but also  collector, in these brief accounts published for the first time in 1986 Soavi tells us about the life, works, habits and ways of the artists he adores and has frequented.Names like Giacometti, de Chirico and Balthus, whom he surprises in their intimate environment, capturing live the transition from life to art and vice versa. He does not do this as a Sunday journalist, and even less by employing the sibylline jargon of the art critic, but as a connoisseur of the subject he is writing about, because he has chewed it over for a long time, without ever satiating his appetite. The novelist’s inventiveness and dexterity come into play when he describes, for example, the feeling of langour and obscenity transmitted by Horst Janssen’s flowers captured just as they begin to wilt. He has the same kind of empathic relationship with the meticulous still lifes by Gianfranco Ferroni, the seascapes and landscapes by Piero Guccione, the flower herbariums by Jean-Pierre Velly, his beloved drawings and watercolours by Folon, Tullio Pericoli and Saul Steinberg, and Domenico Gnoli’s canvases. It seems that the only way for Soavi to write about pictures and artists is to treat them like tempting details of a story, composing pages redolent with aromas and flavours, filled with the genuineness of conversations with friends. With a foreword by Andrea Pinotti

Following the logic of arriving at a definition through pairs of opposites (light/heavy, playful/serious), in this book Massimo Minini analyses and compares two artists who have come to symbolise German art at the turn of the millennium: Anselm Kiefer and Hans-Peter Feldmann. On one side we have Kiefer, the impeccable heir of an art firmly rooted in Expressionism, manifesting sentiments and moods that, under the influence of Jung and Freud, Wagner and Goethe, Hans Baldung and Lukas Cranach, are necessarily profound, weighty and solemn. Kiefer arouses dormant spectres and opts for grandeur in his formats, materials and subject matter (barbed wire, cheval de frise, and sweeping, matter-heavy vistas of ploughed fields). In his world everything is about heaviness, gravity and will. On the other side there is Feldmann, who takes a somewhat lighter view: art is of course a serious matter, but there is no need to overdo it. This curious, ironic and at times bizarre German gentleman was one of the early conceptual artists, but lacked the solemnity of his colleagues, so much so that few took him seriously at the time. So few, indeed, that by the early 1980s his lack of success led to him leaving art altogether, and devoting himself to other things for around a decade. It was Kaspar Konig’s offer of an exhibition in Frankfurt that set his career in motion once more, leading to his present day success and acclaim. The encounter/clash between these two emblems of opposite rationales offers a complex image of a nation’s visual culture.

Artist, photographer and writer, Claude Cahun lived in France in the first half of the twentieth century. Her artistic and political works revolve mainly around the issues of homosexuality and her Jewish origins in a highly anti-Semitic society. This book is the first to examine the iconoclastic urges of Claude Cahun, the compulsion to subvert and destroy the cultural and social references that underpin all of her literary and photographic works. The author starts by looking at the artist’s Jewish, intellectual upper class roots and how she turned her back on her family to develop her artistic identity. We then see how she sets about constructing this new identity, which revolved around her homosexual relationship with Suzanne Malherbe (a.k.a. Marcel Moore), focusing on the portraits/self portraits taken by Malherbe in which Cahun repeatedly uses costume and cross-dressing to obliterate and reinvent herself. This work on self-image and identity is particularly significant in an artist of Jewish origins, whose cultural frame of reference is essentially aniconic and non-figurative.

The flora and fauna of our domestic and urban landscapes are made up of objects that pass in front of our eyes daily. They are all useful and humble. Some are placed tidily in the bathroom cabinet or in the kitchen cupboard, others on our desk, on the streets or in the garden. They are “semplici formalità” (mere formalities), shining examples of efficient design without any stylistic conceits or frills – which is precisely what makes them timeless and iconic. Giulio Iacchetti has chosen 32 of these pleasingly minimal objects to do justice to them and celebrate their form. He does this through photos taken ad hoc and words, recounting the stories and fascinating facts behind the Staunton chessmen, the Arbre Magique, the Italian Monopoly tokens or an ice-cream stick. The enraptured gaze of the designer is combined with the bright, amused gaze of the user, so that each of these objects becomes the protagonist of his daily life or his memories. A declaration of love and gratitude to these familiar and joyful companions that, with their perfect simplicity, have accompanied our changing habits for decades.

This short text by a key contemporary Spanish-American fiction author focuses on two of his chosen themes: the creative process and the relationship between visual art and literature. César Aira addresses them from the perspective of the writer who seeks inspiration, stimuli and methods in art. He has become quite conversant with the intrinsic mechanisms of contemporary art, after seeing a reproduction of Duchamp’s Large Glass in 1967, which cast a spell on him that has never been broken. Aira has always found the unorthodox in contemporary art to be an inexhaustible source of visions. An outsider to the art world, his perspective is fresh and original, as when he applauds the potential of distance between work and viewer or speaks of the stubbornness with which contemporary artists refuse to have their works photographed. Ultimately, he concludes that, with respect to past eras, a work of art today is more relevant when there is less possibility of its being reproduced photographically.    With an afterword by Francesco Bonami

A lengthy hospital stay forces Remo Bianco to stop and assess his life, «The way sailors at sea control their course, calculating the exact distance from the destination». The year is 1982, and the artist feels his journey, begun in the inauspicious year of 1922 - the first of Italy’s fascist regime - is near. He leaves in his wake an eclectic body of work as daring as any avant-gardist’s: from his Spatialist period under the influence of Fontana to the more conceptual series and performances done in the orbit of the Cardazzo brothers, often in advance of French experimental art, plus the collages which followed his discovery of Pollock, and now appear to have inspired his approach to tying his recollections together.Remo Bianco seems to enjoy rearranging the pieces of his existence, inserting the results of urography and gastroscopy exams in his assemblages rather than following the banal pattern of birth, childhood, adolescence and maturity, a zigzag approach in keeping with his anarchic instincts. Memories, thoughts on art, ideas for future works and projects interweave and overlap. Every page of these “notes” confirms his multifaceted capacity to take whatever life brings – loves, literature, encounters, travels – and use it to produce wild, poetic flights of fancy, such as his idea for replacing the bell tower of St. Mark’s Basilica with an enormous pagoda.Framing this caldron of unfettered creativity are a number of extremely humorous, occasionally ribald anecdotes that include noteworthy fellow adventurers, such as de Pisis, Joppolo and Hains. Bianco leaves in the salacious parts, confirming his belief that an autobiography should «show the dirty linen, meaning the truth». With a preface by Sharon Hecker.

The focus of this essay is an evolutionary moment in painting driven by the modern age which Charles Baudelaire contributed to ushering in. In his insightful observations on culture, he did not simply admire and comment on many of the leading painters of his day, but also foresaw, and even encouraged, a new art whose first audacious manifestations did not materialise until forty years after his death in 1867.In response to signs of modernity in the arts, Baudelaire, who more than any other poet was possessed by a wish to flee anywhere out of the world, contended that disdain for the “natural” was actually an attempt to grasp a deeper truth. Day-to-day life was not to be escaped, but rather renewed artificially. Baudelaire remained firmly attached to reality, pointing to aesthetic experience as the antidote to the nihilistic malaise rooted in unsettled randomness, with memory identified as the way to introduce beauty into the world.Adolfo Tura expertly weaves together possibilities and echoes of the past, ultimately revealing how the poetics of memory resurfaces in the motifs and atmospheres of one of the 20th-century masters, Henri Matisse. Guided by Baudelaire’s flame, he revisits some of the most noteworthy figures of modern art, from Mark Rothko to Louise Bourgeois, offering the reader the enchanting experience of brand-new look at what the most modern of the moderns referred to as “imagination”.

Charles Baudelaire, considered the father of modern poetry, also wrote some of the most influential and daring prose pieces of the 19th century. A frequent presence at the Paris salons, he made a point of expressing his theories on modern art and artistic philosophy through incisive, unflinching criticism.This brief essay revolves around the principles of Romanticism, as Baudelaire takes the reader through a methodical analysis of Delacroix and Ingres, revealing his conviction that the pursuit of ideals is a key ingredient of artistic expression. His perspective is of great help in understanding art criticism in 19th-century France, plus changing opinions on the essence of Romanticism and the artist as a creative genius.The preface by Adolfo Tura offers a new perspective on this fundamental text, highlighting its importance for today’s public.

Those who love art will certainly have noticed a development which, though momentous, is seldom discussed: the absence of genuinely religious works, meaning those whose religious sentiment is free of irony or irreverence, in galleries and museums of modern art. The schism between art and religion, far from being a conspiracy of the art world, has distant roots. Having gradually come into being in the Renaissance, it intensified in the 19th century, until today the break appears irreparable. To mend it, the underlying idea of the entire modernist project must be dismantled.This book, which couples rigorous analysis with experimentation, breaks the deafening silence around an issue so thorny it defies attempts to address it both in official art circles and the world of art education. Indeed, this silence forces students to cultivate their religious feelings in secret, lest they be excluded from the system. Drawing on his experience at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, James Elkins takes a pragmatically innovative approach to the tangled mass of practices, opinions and misunderstandings, choosing five students of his who each hold a distinct position on the question: five artists’ accounts which deftly describe the troubled relationship between religion and modern art.But the good intentions of a few isolated figures cannot satisfy the author’s wish for a healing of the chasm of incomprehension between the two sides. What is needed are brand-new forms of dialogue, conversations able to encompass the full scope of the participants’ emotions and experiences. Elkins is already working in this direction, providing artists, students, teachers and scholars with the tools needed to start a constructive, enthralling debate.

Italian edition onlyCount Francesco Mancinelli Scotti, descendent of an Umbrian noble family fallen on hard times, was gripped at roughly age forty by an “insane passion” for archaeology and digs, leading him to devote his next forty years to “devastating” northern Lazio. A man of momentous impulses, such as his enlistment with Garibaldi’s forces at age twenty, Francesco Mancinelli Scotti went on to become a tireless, and quite successful, excavator, collector and merchant of antiquities, selling what he found in digs to American collections and museums, often based on altered information on the pieces’ origins. This side of Mancinelli Scotti’s approach is of particular interest, given that he was active in the same years in which the government established an initial framework for regulating digs, preventing the indiscriminate export of archaeological materials abroad and keeping the antiquities on the market from being dispersed. The dual goal of this volume, therefore, is to portray Francesco Mancinelli Scotti, and the impact of his frenetic exploration, while also promoting further reflection on how best to safeguard our cultural heritage.

In the 21st century, the private museum has become a cultural, social and economic phenomenon of global scale. Over the last twenty years, a fulsome landscape of successful modern-art institutions has been created by collectors, even businesses, with noteworthy examples being the museums of François Pinault, as well as foundations affiliated with leading fashion brands. Closely tied to their founders’ tastes and visions, private museums are often derided as “trophy sepulchres” or expedients for tax purposes, and yet the actual situation is far more nuanced and complex.This overview –which Georgina Adam arrived at after researching more than fifty private museum entities in the United States, Europe, China and elsewhere – combines hard facts with the declarations of those directly involved, tracing the underlying motives and implications of the boom. Why do collectors create their own facilities instead of donating works to local institutions? How do they finance them? Are these nothing more than vanity projects or are they genuine philanthropic initiatives? With great acumen, the author explores the thin line between personal ambition and public good, providing a glimpse of individuals and scenarios both controversial and intriguing.

In September of 1988, a young Nathalie Heinich went to see Harald Szeemann in his studio in Monte Verità. She interviewed him, seeking confirmation of her feeling that the figure of the curator increasingly resembled that of the artist. And who better to tell her than Harald Szeemann, whose thirty years of curating exhibitions brought forth an approach all his own?Once the youngest-ever Director of the Kunsthalle Bern, Szeemann was also the General Secretary of documenta 5 in Kassel (1972), but he attained mythical status with the ground-breaking “When Attitudes Become Form”, a cathartic 1969 exhibition that broke with the past, in search of a new aesthetic. Among curators-creators, Szeemann is a “case apart”, thanks to an inimitable style that, found far from the beaten path, always heeded his own instincts, shifting the focus from the official value of a given work to an almost sentimental relationship with the artist and the materials on exhibit. A curator-creator must rely on his or her sixth sense, on private obsessions, focussing not on career advancement but on subjects that they, and they alone, can address.In defending his or her uniquely personal outlook, the curator moulds the contents of each exhibition, as well as the logical link between one exhibition and another, establishing a magnum opus which increasingly resembles one large, personal work driven by an intimate necessity, fuelled by the scenarios of a biographical arc, and not simply by chance or the dictates of an institutional program.