Catalog

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 plitically 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 deisgn'. The historical value of this project, which went on to be featured in prestigious world venes, 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 offered 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 poduced. 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.

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”.

Known primarily as a visual artist, Mike Kelley was in actual fact an irrepressible, multifaceted figure. In addition to using the most varied means of expression, from drawing to video, performance and installation, he often went beyond the traditional boundaries of the work by incorporating writing in the creative process and producing statements and texts of various kinds. Above all, he broke down the barrier that traditionally exists between the roles of the critic and the artist. It is by focusing on these parallel pathways of action and word and highlighting their powers of reciprocal cross-fertilization that the author addresses questions such as Kelley’s collaboration in the artistic and musical fields, e.g. with Paul McCarthy and as a member of the Destroy All Monsters noise band, his interest in the aesthetic of ufology, his obsession with rag toys, the importance of authority and memory in his art, and what can be regarded as a key turning point in his work and thought, namely the uncanny, Freud’s Unheimliche, to which he devoted an important show. An artist, curator, writer, interviewer, critic, musician active on the alternative scene and many other things, Mike Kelley was one of the most original artists of our time.

Fifth volume of the serie “Quaderni del collezionismo”, edited by Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli and published in co-edition withJohan & Levi editore.

Lucid exponent of the American New Topographics current in the 1970s, and constantly engaged in deconstructing the politics of places and representations, since his debut Lewis Baltz has combined his visual art with thoughtful critical - and self-critical - writings. The reflections gathered in this book offer various perspectives on his forty year career and the transatlantic context it developed in, with pieces that accompany the early topographical pieces, narratives embedded in the text-image works of the late 1980s, and a substantial series of essays devoted to some of the most important photographers and artists of the twentieth century. In the latter, attention to the enigmatic materiality of the works is combined with a cool, disenchanted critique of their cultural, and also political worth. In this vein there are essays dedicated to Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Robert Adams, Michael Schmidt, Allan Sekula, Thomas Ruff and Jeff Wall, which explore the potential and limits of modernist photography. The book also contains detailed appreciations of artists like Krzysztof Wodiczko, Félix González-Torres, Barry Le Va, Chris Burden, James Turrell and Robert Irwin, John McLaughlin and Alessandro Laita, contemporaries of Baltz's with whom he shared artistic and life experiences. The book also offers insights on more general issues, such as the landscape and cities "in the age of nothing special". While the gelid calm of Baltz's post-apocalyptic imagery helped purify the photograph of the last thirty years from the rhetorically opposing currents of social exposé and revelation, the harsh, even caustic tone of these writings continues to be relevant, challenging the presumed certainties upon which we base the institutions of art and photography.

Happiness and melancholia were the two extremes that marked the life and artistic career of Ettore Sottsass: happiness at having experienced the lost but ever-present paradise of childhood; sorrow at not being able to return there, not being able to stop time. The organisational psychologist and photographer Giuseppe Varchetta started photographing Ettore Sottsass in 1978, when the designer was already sixty, and continued to do so for the rest of his life. In this discreet, attentive, at times intimate account, Varchetta examines his friend’s face and follows his gradual changes, capturing all the nuances of that mournful expression, and, beyond the sadness, a smile that was an explosion of empathy.

Cinema studies have undergone such proliferation since the 1990s as to become an authentic academic discipline. Their object of investigation now appears, however, to be gradually dissolving into a flux of ever-changing, global and globalizing culture of the image, audiovisual, electronic, digital and web. Miriam Bratu Hansen goes back to the principle, to the clear-sighted critique of modernity developed by three pillars of 20th-century aesthetics, Kracauer, Benjamin and Adorno, on this particular medium: not on what cinema is but on what it does, on the particular sensory and mimetic experience that it makes possible for spectators. Starting, for example, from the Mickey Mouse cartoons, whose immense popularity Benjamin attributed simply to “the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them”. This is not therefore an ontology of cinema but an attempt to understand its role within evolving modernity, albeit with different perspectives and approaches. In point of fact, films make a substantial contribution to the reconfiguration of experience understood in its fullest sense of Erfahrung, as everyday life, social and working relationships, the economic and political spheres. Despite the competitive media environment into which it is embedded, cinema has survived, adapted and transformed itself. The recent opening of the digital frontier and the necessary rethinking of devices as well as fundamental film categories like movement and animation present a new challenge that is not, however, a threat. Having “burst this prison-world asunder with the dynamite of the tenth of a second”, cinema could reopen apparently closed chapters of aesthetics and restore their contemporary relevance.

In a career of just twelve years, the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels, 1924 – Cologne, 1976) produced more ideas than most artists do in an entire lifetime. After devoting himself to poetry for twenty years, he abandoned it in 1964 to enter into a pact with a universe of very different values, namely the visual arts. Traversing media freely – from installation and sculpture to artist’s books, prints, film and inscriptions on aluminium panels – Broodthaers embodied the “post-media artist” for whom any form could be used in the service of an idea. The conceptions that drove his work included institutional critique (of which he was a pioneer), the debunking of art and visual puzzles. Edited by the artist’s daughter Marie-Puck Broodthaers, the book includes a vast selection of previously unpublished photographs, two important art-critical studies, a complete exhibition chronology and a select bibliography. With its 350 colour photographs, this is the most important and authoritative monograph ever published on Marcel Broodthaers.