Art Nouveau and Avant-garde 31.10. 2014 - 15.2. 2015 Galleria Nazionale dArte Moderna Viale delle Belle Arti 131 - 00196 Rome The exhibition examines a moment of particular innovative fervor in Italian artistic and literary culture immediately preceding the First World War. A brief period, marked ideologically by political and social contrasts, during which artists and critics questioned their beliefs on the concepts of modernity and the avantgarde. While the 19th century, the ‘long century, was dying, and with it the positive mythology of the Belle Époque, a generation of young artists placed themselves in open conflict with the consolidated system of exposition offices, contesting the conservative and selective criteria that regulated participation, and claiming autonomy of research and liberty of expression. As had already come to pass in Berlin, Monaco, and Vienna and in other European centres, groups of young and also older Italian artists chose to associate themselves with the common school of Secession, both interpreted, to the letter, as separatism, clear-cut division, and as a demonstration that brought together the most innovative forces surrounding modernist conceptions, but in which they were not late in comprehending elements of the avantgarde. The exhibition begins with the year 1905, in which Severini and Boccioni organized at the Ridotto del Teatro Nazionale of Rome an Exhibition of Refused Artists that constituted a first seed of opposition. The needs for a renovation and for an international opening were focused on between 1908 and 1914 in Venice and in Rome, in the demonstrations of Ca Pesaro and of the Secessione Romana, while the shocking originality of the Futurists found a new site for exhibitions, also in Rome, at the Sprovieri Gallery. Ca Pesaro and the Secessione Romana represent, therefore, the poles of a ‘moderate avantgarde, opposed, not without contradictions, to the radical avantgarde of Futurism, which intended to influence, in a revolutionary way, the artistic language and the social and political reality. The exhibition closes, therefore, on the tabula rasa that the world conflict realised in regard to every avantgarde aspiration, absorbing that vital passion. With the enthusiastic interventionism of the Futurists, with the new, highly modern iconography of the war, it opposed the poetry of silence and absence, the omen of the imminent drama, of the early De Chirico.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 16:24:23 +0000
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