Vita nuova - Italian art, Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York

Art in America, June, 1995 by Raphael Rubinstein

In 1964, when Italo Calvino came to write an introduction for a new edition of his first novel, The Path to the Nest Of Spiders (1947), he remembered the period immediately following World War 11 as a time when it seemed that all of Italy

felt a rage to narrate: in the trains that were beginning to run again, crammed with people and sacks of flour and drums of olive oil, every passenger told his vicissitudes to strangers, and so did every customer at the tables of the cheap restaurants, every woman waiting in line outside a shop. The grayness of life seemed to belong to other periods; we moved in a varicolored universe of stories.(1)

This moment of reawakening is the departure point for the Guggenheim Museum's recent exhibition "The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968" (currently on view at the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, through the summer). Something like the "rage to narrate" Calvino describes can be seen among the first works in the show: Leoncillo's painted ceramic sculpture titled Roman Mother Killed by the Germans (1944), Renato Guttuso's Cubist-influenced painting Massacre of the Lambs (1947) and Fausto Melotti's bas relief Postwar (1946), a schematic representation of figures in a bombed-out city. Even the more abstract and slightly later paintings by Giulio Turcato (who died at the age of 82 during the New York run of the show) like Ruins of Warsaw (1949) and Political Meeting (ca. 1949) were clearly driven by a narrative impulse,

But after these paintings and sculptures, narrative (at least in any commonly understood sense) essentially disappeared from the visual art section of the exhibition. For stories one had to turn to the cinema and the films of Visconti, Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Antonioni and Pasolini. From the poignant tales of Neo-Realist classics like De Sica's Umberto D to the nearoperatic spectacles of Feuini, postwar Italian cinema was rarely short of stories to tell.

In addition to a film series and a display of movie posters, "The Italian Metamorphosis," which was curated by Germano Celant, included large sections devoted to Italian fashion, design, architecture and photography. (There were also numerous vitrines filled with books, exhibition catalogues and ephemera of the period, from a tiny 1944 chapbook of Melotti's poems to the first Arte Povera catalogue from 1967.) While much research no doubt went into gathering the vintage designer dresses and architectural models on display, their presentation seemed rather cursory. In the catalogue, photographs and commentary provided a social context, as with Jennifer Blessing's lively essay on the role of the paparazzi in Italian culture (Feuini's La Dolce Vita, for instance, included scenes inspired by magazine layouts of paparazzi shots). But in the museum, the artifacts--tiers of expensively clad mannequins; Olivetti typewriters; a car prototype--were isolated in their separate domains (fashion, design, etc.) with little in the way of interdisciplinary connections. This was too bad, since the shows aim to give an overall picture of a society was admirable, and something that New York museums generally don't attempt. The absence of a successful dialogue among the various sections left one ultimately wishing that more space had been given over to painting and sculpture, the real strengths of this exhibition.

While Italian cinema was quick to recover from the war--Roberto Rossellini was filming Open City in the streets of Rome while German troops were still there--visual art took a little longer to get back on its feet. Repatriation helped. In 1947, the protean Lucio Fontana (a one-man "Italian metamorphosis," as evidenced by his many and varied paintings, sculptures and ceramic works in this show) returned from Argentina, where he had spent the war, and Alberto Burii--back the year before from a prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford, Texas, where he began painting on sugar sacks--had his first solo show. Also in 1947, a number of mostly abstract painters (including Turcato, Carla Accardi, Piero Dorazio and others) founded the group Forma, and started a journal of the same name. Italian abstraction of the time explored a range of styles, from the turbulent gestural painting of Emilio Vedova to Afro's fuzzy, School of Paris compositions and the hard-edge, petroglyph-inspired canvases of Giuseppe Capogrossi, who died in 1972. Seeing several paintings by Capogrossi--an artist far too little known in the U.S.--was, for me, one of the chief pleasures of this show. Capogrossi's modular compositions, in which a single basic form proliferates and mutates in endless variety (at various times suggesting a grazing horse, a gap-toothed jawbone and a spindly insect), are visually electrifying. Each canvas offers new relationships of scale and color among these humorous and menacing glyphs. For contemporary American viewers, Capogrossi's work has formal affinities with surprisingly diverse artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jonathan Lasker and Rona Pondick. Using a related visual language of glyph-like shapes, Carla Accardi's large rectangular canvas Red-Green Lozenges (1964) is at once calligraphic and pulsating with optical effects. The show also included a group of Accardi's Rolls, 1965-68, paintings made on freestanding tubes of transparent plastic. (Of the 32 artists in the show, there are only two women, Accardi and Marisa Merz. This is not entirely the fault 6f the curator: Celant's choices reflect the Italian art world's longstanding and shameful disregard of women artists.