This is a creative project for my Curatorial Theory and Exhibition Design course in the MA program in Museum Studies at CUNY School of Professional Studies.
This exhibition brings to the attention of an international audience a little-known but innovative period in Italy’s rich artistic history: Italian Abstract Art from 1930 to 1970. The artists presented are associated with five artistic movements – Geometric Abstract Art, Arte Informale, the Azimuth Group, Spatialism, and Kinetic Art – spanning a historical time marked by Fascism, World War II, and the social and economic boom of the Fifties and Sixties. Each movement was characterized by a break from earlier traditions and by the exploration of new artistic forms leading to a rethinking of art itself. At the same time, the artists in these movements aspired to a higher purpose, both on the canvas and perhaps also in life: finding harmony through creative expression.
In dialogue with local and international influences, from Italian Rationalist architecture to American Abstract Expressionism, the works in this exhibition reflect the unique approaches of artists who defied tradition to embrace the new. Amidst the turmoil of the age, geometric abstract artists found balance through vibrant compositions of shapes and colors, while post-war Informale artists abandoned every connection with reality to focus exclusively on signs and patterns. The innovation continued with the artists of The Azimuth Group, who manipulated the canvas to let the light bring artworks to life. The Spazialisti projected art into space through forms and color and, in the most revolutionary artistic gesture yet, by slashing the canvas itself. The exhibition ends with a group of works reflecting the Italian take on kinetic art.
The artworks on display are accompanied by photos of the artists, original documents, publications, quotations, and videos highlighting the novelty of this artistic period and the brilliance of its many protagonists.
The Quest for a New Harmony: Geometric Abstract Art
We yearned for something new, that had a cultural content and wide breath, international in character, something that would not belong to the national bourgeois taste and that was not at the service of a party.
Maria Cernuschi, abstract art collector
Geometric abstract art emerged in Italy in the 1930s thanks to an eclectic group of artists from the northern cities of Milan and Como. In Milan, artists gravitated around the gallery Il Milione, which often hosted exhibitions by contemporary European painters and sculptors. In Como, they studied the shapes and colors of the town’s thriving textile industry and collaborated with Rationalist architects, who had abandoned traditional designs to build functional buildings characterized by clean lines and strong geometric forms.
Influenced by these trends and longing for new moral and aesthetic ideals, these artists were no longer interested in representing subjects and content. They turned to shape and color to create formal geometric compositions that communicated harmony and a sense of proportion. Carlo Belli is the intellectual who formulated this new aesthetic in his 1935 book Kn, considered by Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky the bible of abstract art. “Art is at his own service,” Belli declared. “Art is.”
At the time, Italy was ruled by an increasingly authoritarian government led by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party. The Fascist regime considered abstract art subversive, promoting instead an art that reflected nationalistic values and looked back at the country’s great classical past. Despite these obstacles, artists like Mauro Reggiani, Carla Badiali, Mario Radice, Manlio Rho, and others produced elegant works that introduced a new modern artistic tradition in Italy.
The Freedom of Signs: Arte Informale
The basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.
Jackson Pollock, artist
After World War II, some Italian artists broke with conventional notions of order and composition to create “art of another kind,” as French critic Michel Tapié called it in a 1952 book by the same name. This new art consisted in the application of paint on the canvas in free-sweeping gestures, producing an effect of pure abstraction that was even more removed from realism and figuration than previous trends.
Peggy Guggenheim, American art collector and niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, contributed to the success of many artists in this movement, including Emilio Vedova, Giuseppe Santomaso, and Tancredi Parmeggiani. By bringing American contemporary art to the 1948 Venice Biennale, she introduced Italian artists to movements like Abstract Expressionism. She then supported them while they experimented with their individual styles, from the signature knots of Emilio Scanavino to the almost calligraphic signs of Carla Accardi.
Pinot Gallizio went even further with his experimentation. He applied paint to long rolls of canvas to be sold by the meter, alluding to the commercialization of art in the emerging capitalistic society.
Return to the Canvas: The Azimuth Group
Subjective invention is the only means of discovering objective reality, the only means that gives us the possibility of communication.
Piero Manzoni, artist
In the late 1950s, a group of artists writing for the Milan-based Azimuth journal distanced themselves from the experience of Arte Informale and advocated for a return to the form. They achieved this by shaping the white or monochromatic canvas in different ways. Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, and Agostino Bonalumi were the main representatives of this original artistic phase.
Castellani and Manzoni created artworks by simply manipulating the canvas. Manzoni soaked it in kaolin (a soft clay) to obtain a colorless surface interrupted only by the folds and creases produced by the drying solution. Castellani stretched the canvas on nails to generate constantly changing patterns of light and shade.
Bonalumi turned his canvases into sculptures by shaping them with a range of materials. “I dreamed that, with art, I could catch the mysteries of shadows and nature,” he recalled in a 2014 interview, “and then bring them home with me to contemplate them.”
In Search of Another Dimension: Spatialism
By slashing the canvas, Fontana rejected it as a space of representation and turned it into an artwork.
Agostino Bonalumi, artist
Argentinian-born Lucio Fontana is the star artist of this exhibition. His trademark Spatial Concepts (canvases with one or more incisions) are displayed in major world museums and sell for millions of dollars. Slashing the canvas may seem like a simple idea today, but in the 1950s it was revolutionary. In a world characterized by new scientific discoveries, cosmic space development, and the advent of television, Fontana found a powerful way to express that expansion through his art.
Spatialism, the art movement he founded in 1947, called for an art that embraced science and technology: “I don’t want to make paintings,” he stated in his Manifesto for Spatial Art. “I want to open up some space, create a new artistic dimension, connect with the cosmos, which stretches out infinitely, beyond the flat surface of the image.”
Other members of Spatialism were Gianni Dova and Roberto Crippa. Dova splashed liquid paint onto the canvas to create shapeless compositions that evoke the devastating potential of a nuclear explosion. Crippa’s signature paintings, elaborated spirals on monochromatic surfaces, recall the aerial acrobatics he did as a pilot, which eventually claimed his life.
The Effect of Motion: Kinetic Art
Every work of modern art figures out a new law, imposes a new paradigm, a new way of looking at the world.
Umberto Eco, writer and literary critic
The advent of television and other technological developments did not influence only the Spazialisti artists. In the 1960s, a new art movement known as optical or kinetic art emerged.
While the works of The Azimuth Group artists relied on an interplay of light and shade for their varying effects, optical and kinetic art change in appearance depending on the angle a spectator is looking at it. These variations create an illusory effect of movement that confounds and fascinates at the same time.
The main representative of kinetic art in Italy was Alberto Biase, who co-founded the art collective Group N in Padua. Biase was one of a few Italian artists displayed in the groundbreaking 1965 MoMA exhibition on optical art titled “The Responsive Eye.” Another was Getulio Alviani, who transformed the polished aluminum surfaces found in the factory where he was employed into works of kinetic art. Aluminum is also the material chosen by Marina Apollonio and other artists in this movement to create structures that shimmer as they reflect the viewer’s movement.
Works
Influences
Artists
Documents
Videos
Learn more about Casa del Fascio (1936) in Como, designed by Rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni and decorated by geometric abstract artist Mario Radice.
Agostino Bonalumi reflects on his journey as an abstract artist.