| Art of Italy |
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| Italian artists |
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Italian Contemporary art refers to painting and sculpture in Italy from the early 20th century onwards.
The founder and most influential personality of Futurism was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto in 1909.
The Futurists expressed a loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. They admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. The Futurists practised in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture and even gastronomy.
The leading painters of the movement were Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. They advocated a "universal dynamism," which was to be directly represented in painting. At first they used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, later adopting the methods of Cubism. In 1912, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate into three dimensions his Futurist ideas.
Advocates of war as "the world's best hygiene," Marinetti, Boccioni, and Sant'Elia all volunteered to fight during World War One. The unofficial end of the first wave of Futurism (also known as the Heroic Years) was in 1916 - the same year Boccioni died in the war. [1]
After the War, Marinetti revived the movement, seeking to make Futurism the official state art of Fascist Italy. The main expression of Futurism in painting in the 1930s and early 1940s was Aeropainting ( aeropittura ), launched in a manifesto of 1929, Perspectives of Flight, signed by Benedetta Cappa, Fortunato Depero, Gerardo Dottori, Fillìa, Marinetti, Enrico Prampolini, Somenzi and Tato. The technology and excitement of flight, directly experienced by most aeropainters, [2] offered aeroplanes and aerial landscape as new subject matter.
Futurism had depended so much on its energetic promotion by Marinetti that his death in 1944 brought the movement to an end. Its association with Italian Fascism meant that most of its artists were shunned in the post-war years, but it has received scholarly attention in recent decades and a major exhibition was launched to coincide with the centenary in 2009. In 2014, the Solomon R. Guggenheim held a major Futurist retrospective featuring over 300 Futurist pieces spanning all media they worked in.
Novecento Italiano was an Italian artistic movement founded in Milan in 1922 by Anselmo Bucci (1887–1955), Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi and Mario Sironi. Motivated by a post-war “call to order”, they were brought together by Lino Pesaro, a gallery owner interested in modern art, and Margherita Sarfatti, a writer and art critic who worked on Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia . Sarfatti was also Mussolini’s mistress.
The movement was officially launched in 1923 at an exhibition in Milan, with Mussolini as one of the speakers. After being represented at the Venice Biennale of 1924, the group split and was reformed. The new Novecento Italiano staged its first group exhibition in Milan in 1926.
Several of the artists were war veterans; Sarfatti had lost a son in the war. The group wished to take on the Italian establishment and create an art associated with the rhetoric of Fascism. The artists supported the Fascist regime and their work became associated with the state propaganda department, although Mussolini reprimanded Sarfatti for using his name and the name of Fascism to promote Novecento. [3]
The name of the movement (which means 1900s) was a deliberate reference to Italian art in the 15th and 16th centuries. The group rejected European avant garde art and wished to revive the tradition of large format history painting in the classical manner. It lacked a precise artistic programme and included artists of different styles and temperament, for example, Carrà and Marini. It aimed to promote a renewed yet traditional Italian art. Sironi said, “if we look at the painters of the second half of the 19th century, we find that only the revolutionary were great and that the greatest were the most revolutionary”; the artists of Novecento Italiano “would not imitate the world created by God but would be inspired by it”.
Metaphysical art (Italian : Pittura metafisica) is the name of an Italian art movement, created by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. Their dream-like paintings of squares typical of idealized Italian cities, as well as apparently casual juxtapositions of objects, represented a visionary world which engaged most immediately with the unconscious mind, beyond physical reality, hence the name. The metaphysical movement provided significant impetus for the development of Dada and Surrealism.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Italian sculptors and painters joined the rest of Western Europe in the revitalization of a simpler, more vigorous, less sentimental Classical tradition, that was applied in liturgical as well as decorative and political settings. The leading sculptors included: Libero Andreotti, Arturo Martini, Giacomo Manzù, Nicola Neonato, Pietro Guida, Marcello Mascherini.
The term Arte Povera was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether art as the private expression of the individual still had an ethical reason to exist. Italian art critic Germano Celant organized two exhibitions in 1967 and 1968, followed by an influential book called Arte Povera, promoting the notion of a revolutionary art, free of convention, the power of structure, and the market place. Although Celant attempted to encompass the radical elements of the entire international scene, the term properly centered on a group of Italian artists who attacked the corporate mentality with an art of unconventional materials and style.
The most wide-ranging public collection of works from the Arte Povera movement is at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein.
Transavantgarde is the Italian version of Neo-expressionism, an art movement that swept through Italy, and the rest of Western Europe, in the late 1970s and 1980s. The term transavantgarde was coined by the Italian art critic, Achille Bonito Oliva, and literally means beyond the avant-garde . This art movement rejected conceptual art, reintroducing emotion―especially joy―back into painting and sculpture. The artists revived figurative art and symbolism. The principal transavantgarde artists were Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola de Maria, Mimmo Paladino, and Remo Salvadori.
Italian interior design in the 20th century was particularly well-known and grew to the heights of class and sophistication. At first, in the early 20th century, Italian furniture designers struggled to create an equal balance between classical elegance and modern creativity, and at first, Italian interior design in the 1910s and 1920s was very similar to that of French art deco styles, using exotic materials and creating sumptuous furniture. However, Italian art deco reached its pinnacle under Gio Ponti, who made his designs sophisticated, elegant, stylish and refined, but also modern, exotic and creative. In 1926, a new style of furnishing emerged in Italy, known as "Razionalismo", or "Rationalism". The most successful and famous of the Rationalists were the Gruppo 7, led by Luigi Figini, Gino Pollini and Giuseppe Terragni. Their styles used tubular steel and was known as being more plain and simple, and almost Fascist in style after c. 1934. After World War II, however, was the period in which Italy had a true avant-garde in interior design. With the fall of Fascism, rise of Socialism and the 1946 RIMA exhibition, Italian talents in interior decorating were made evident, and with the Italian economic miracle, Italy saw a growth in industrial production and also mass-made furniture. Yet, the 1960s and 1970s saw Italian interior design reach its pinnacle of stylishness, and by that point, with Pop and post-modern interiors, the phrases "Bel Designo" and "Linea Italiana" entered the vocabulary of furniture design. [4]
Michelangelo Pistoletto began painting on mirrors in 1962, connecting painting with the constantly changing realities in which the work finds itself. In the later 1960s he began bringing together rags with casts of omnipresent classical statuary of Italy to break down the hierarchies of "art" and common things. An art of impoverished materials is certainly one aspect of the definition of Arte Povera. In his 1967 Muretto di straci (Rag Wall) Pistoletto makes an exotic and opulent tapestry wrapping common bricks in discarded scraps of fabric.
Artists such as Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz attempted to make the experience of art more immediately real while also more closely connecting the individual to nature.
The leading sculptors from 1930-40 to 2000 included Marino Marini, Emilio Greco, Pino Pascali, Mario Ceroli, Giovanni e Arnaldo Pomodoro, Umberto Mastroianni, Ettore Colla, Carmelo Cappello.
The leading painters from 1930-40 to 2000 included Alberto Savinio, Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Magnelli, Felice Casorati, Roberto Melli, Corrado Cagli, Gianfilippo Usellini, Pietro Annigoni, Renato Guttuso, Lucio Fontana, Giovanni Capogrossi, Enrico Accatino, Antonio Donghi, Oreste Carpi, Fausto Pirandello, Afro Basaldella, Alberto Burri, Mimmo Rotella, Franco Nonnis, Domenico Gnoli, Valerio Adami, Piero Manzoni, Emilio Tadini, Salvatore Provino, Mino Argento.
A new breed of contemporary Italian artist such as Gaspare Manos are developing a more global language that draws on a vast international personal experience of life and culture stretching over several continents and many decades of travel. Such artist think locally and act globally, like Rabarama who has been the first Italian sculptor to collaborate with the Cirque du Soleil. [5] An equivalent in Spain for example is the painter Miquel Barceló.
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti is best known as the author of the first Futurist Manifesto, which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures included the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. Italian Futurism glorified modernity and according to its doctrine, aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. Important Futurist works included Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni's 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla's 1913–1914 painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913).
Umberto Boccioni was an influential Italian painter and sculptor. He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures. Despite his short life, his approach to the dynamism of form and the deconstruction of solid mass guided artists long after his death. His works are held by many public art museums, and in 1988 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City organized a major retrospective of 100 pieces.
Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter, art teacher and poet best known as a key proponent of Futurism. In his paintings, he depicted light, movement and speed. He was concerned with expressing movement in his works, but unlike other leading futurists he was not interested in machines or violence with his works tending towards the witty and whimsical.
Since ancient times, Greeks, Etruscans and Celts have inhabited the south, centre and north of the Italian peninsula respectively. The very numerous rock drawings in Valcamonica are as old as 8,000 BC, and there are rich remains of Etruscan art from thousands of tombs, as well as rich remains from the Greek colonies at Paestum, Agrigento and elsewhere. Ancient Rome finally emerged as the dominant Italian and European power. The Roman remains in Italy are of extraordinary richness, from the grand Imperial monuments of Rome itself to the survival of exceptionally preserved ordinary buildings in Pompeii and neighbouring sites. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, in the Middle Ages Italy remained an important centre, not only of the Carolingian art, Ottonian art of the Holy Roman Emperors, Norman art, but for the Byzantine art of Ravenna and other sites.
Gino Severini was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. He was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War. During his career he worked in a variety of media, including mosaic and fresco. He showed his work at major exhibitions, including the Rome Quadrennial, and won art prizes from major institutions.
Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter and a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.
Zang Tumb Tumb is a sound poem and concrete poem written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian futurist. It appeared in excerpts in journals between 1912 and 1914, when it was published as an artist's book in Milan. It is an account of the Battle of Adrianople, which he witnessed as a reporter for L'Intransigeant. The poem uses Parole in libertà and other poetic impressions of the events of the battle, including the sounds of gunfire and explosions. The work is now seen as a seminal work of modernist art, and an enormous influence on the emerging culture of European avant-garde print.
"[The] masterpiece of Words-in-freedom and of Marinetti’s literary career was the novel Zang Tumb Tuuum... the story of the siege by the Bulgarians of Turkish Adrianople in the Balkan War, which Marinetti had witnessed as a war reporter. The dynamic rhythms and onomatopoetic possibilities that the new form offered were made even more effective through the revolutionary use of different typefaces, forms and graphic arrangements and sizes that became a distinctive part of Futurism. In Zang Tumb Tuuum; they are used to express an extraordinary range of different moods and speeds, quite apart from the noise and chaos of battle.... Audiences in London, Berlin and Rome alike were bowled over by the tongue-twisting vitality with which Marinetti declaimed Zang Tumb Tuuum. As an extended sound poem it stands as one of the monuments of experimental literature, its telegraphic barrage of nouns, colours, exclamations and directions pouring out in the screeching of trains, the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, and the clatter of telegraphic messages." — Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzola
Cubo-Futurism or Kubo-Futurizm was an art movement, developed within Russian Futurism, that arose in early 20th century Russian Empire, defined by its amalgamation of the artistic elements found in Italian Futurism and French Analytical Cubism. Cubo-Futurism was the main school of painting and sculpture practiced by the Russian Futurists. In 1913, the term "Cubo-Futurism" first came to describe works from members of the poetry group "Hylaeans", as they moved away from poetic Symbolism towards Futurism and zaum, the experimental "visual and sound poetry of Kruchenykh and Khlebninkov". Later in the same year the concept and style of "Cubo-Futurism" became synonymous with the works of artists within Ukrainian and Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde circles as they interrogated non-representational art through the fragmentation and displacement of traditional forms, lines, viewpoints, colours, and textures within their pieces. The impact of Cubo-Futurism was then felt within performance art societies, with Cubo-Futurist painters and poets collaborating on theatre, cinema, and ballet pieces that aimed to break theatre conventions through the use of nonsensical zaum poetry, emphasis on improvisation, and the encouragement of audience participation.
Mario Sironi was an Italian Modernist artist who was active as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and designer. His typically somber paintings are characterized by massive, immobile forms.
Ardengo Soffici was an Italian writer, painter, poet, sculptor and intellectual.
Novecento Italiano was an Italian artistic movement founded in Milan in 1922 to create an art based on the rhetoric of the fascism of Mussolini.
The Street Enters the House is an 1912 oil-on-canvas painting by Italian artist Umberto Boccioni. Painted in the Futurist style, the work centres on a woman on a balcony in front of a busy street, with the sounds of the activity below portrayed as a riot of shapes and colours.
Development of a Bottle in Space is a bronze futurist sculpture by Umberto Boccioni. Initially a sketch in Boccioni’s "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture"," the design was later cast into bronze by Boccioni himself in the year 1913. Consistent with many of themes in Boccioni’s manifesto, the work of art highlights the artist’s first successful attempt at creating a sculpture that both molds and encloses space within itself.
Girl Running on a Balcony is a 1912 painting by Giacomo Balla, one of the forerunners of the Italian movement called Futurism. The piece indicates the artist's growing interests in creative nuances which would later formally be realized as part of the Futurist movement. The artist was heavily influenced by northern Italians' use of Divisionism and the French's better-known pointillism. Created with oil on canvas just on the brink of World War I, the Futurist movement is embodied by a dark optimism for a future of speed, turbulence, chaos, and new beginnings. Most of Giacaomo Balla's pieces allude to the wonder of dynamic movement, and this painting is no exception. The oil painting is now in the Museo del Novecento, in Milan.
The Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (1910) by Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) was the first exposition of the theoretical underpinnings of Italian Futurist painting.
Three Women is a painting by Italian artist Umberto Boccioni, executed between 1909 and 1910. This painting is oil on canvas painted in the style of divisionism. Divisionism refers to the actual division of colors by creating separated brush strokes as opposed to smooth, solid lines. The painting contains three figures, one being Boccioni's mother Cecilia on the left, another being his sister, Amelia on the right, and the third being Ines, his lover, in the center.
Street Light (also known as The Street Light: Study of Light and Street Lamp (Suffering of a Street Lamp)) (Italian: Lampada ad arco) is a painting by Italian Futurist painter Giacomo Balla, dated 1909, depicting an electric street lamp casting a glow that outshines the crescent moon. The painting was inspired by streetlights at the Piazza Termini in Rome.
Růžena Zátková, also called Rougina Zatkova, was a painter and sculptor who has been regarded as the "only authentic Czech futurist." As a result of her Bohemian heritage and her decade-long residency in Rome, Růžena Zátková became an important artistic link between Russian and Italian Futurism. Zátková is considered one of the pioneers of kinetic art.
Emilio Notte was an Italian painter, active in a Futurist style.