NEW YORK NEW YORK – Italian Art: Rediscovering America

Running to September 17, 2017, the exhibition NEW YORK NEW YORK. Italian Art: Rediscovering America is curated by Francesco Tedeschi with Francesca Pola and Federica Boragina, sponsored by the City of Milan – Culture, Museo del Novecento and Intesa Sanpaolo – Gallerie d’Italia, in partnership with the publishing house Electa.

The exhibition unfolds between the two museums and presents more than 150 works, resting, as the curator writes, “on a series of events, encounters and occasions that enabled 20th-century Italian art to achieve an international presence and prominence that placed it in the forefront of the idea of modernity itself.” This centrality was “attained through a series of links of various kinds with the United States, and in particular with the environment and city of New York, which became both actually and symbolically the center of 20th-century artistic culture in the postwar years. But here consideration is also given to earlier episodes, that helped set the stage for events that emerged clearly only later, through the different historical phases traversed by the two countries.”

The exhibition presents, through their works, the stories of Italian artists who traveled, stayed, worked and exhibited in the United States, particularly New York, or just imagined the New World, all seeking a freer spirit and different models from old Europe.  This was a highly articulated and complex story that started in the twenties, when Fortunato Depero, a leading Futurist, went for a long stay in the United States (arriving in the fall of 1928 he stayed about two years), symbolically becoming the starting point for the encounter with American  life, until the two-year period 1967-68, when Ugo Mulas published New York: The New Art Scene, the book which brought together images taken since 1964 of the outstanding American artists of the day. In the same period important exhibitions were also held, including a significant show in 1949 devoted to Italian art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – the first time the MoMA had devoted a major exhibition to the contemporary artistic production of a single country – and a double event in 1968 devoted to recent Italian art at the Jewish Museum of Art in New York. 

The Museo del Novecento presents the American imagination and above all the intense relationship with the city of New York, as it was perceived by Italian artists, with works by Afro, Paolo Baratella, Corrado Cagli, Pietro Consagra, Giorgio De Chirico, Fortunato Depero, Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Emilio Isgrò, Sergio Lombardo, Titina Maselli,  Costantino Nivola, Gastone Novelli, Vinicio Paladini, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Mimmo Rotella, Alberto Savinio, Toti Scialoja, Tancredi, Giulio Turcato. A separate section is devoted to Ugo Mulas’s photographs of New York and American artists.

[ph: Mimmo Rotella, Viva l’America, 1963, 85×89 cm, decollage su tela, Collezione Privata © Courtesy Fondazione Marconi, Milano]