kupkagroveonlineno2
Kupka, František [from OCWA]
(1871–1957).Czech-born painter of the École de Paris. After studying in Jaromer in eastern Bohemia, Prague, and Vienna, Kupka settled in Paris in 1895, supporting himself as an illustrator. Initially he worked in a symbolist manner, as in Ballad-Joys (1901–2; Prague, Národní Gal.), but his interest in colour theory and his studies of movement led him towards abstraction. Piano Keys—Lake (1909; Prague, Národní Gal.) combines naturalistic depiction of water with abstract strips of colour which relate to his ideas about musical composition. This work is indicative of Kupka's distance from the dominant Parisian mode of abstraction, Cubism, and his conceptual approach to art. He soon developed an uncompromising geometrical abstraction based on strong compositional grids: vertical strips, diagonal grids, and concentric or spiralling circles, for instance Disks of Newton, Study for Fugue in Two Colours (1911–12; Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou). His later work has a more subdued colour, reduced elements, and a more static effect, Purist in tone.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Morgan Falconer
From: http://www.groveart.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/shared/views/article.html?from=search&session_search_id=357343283&hitnum=2§ion=art.992492
kupkagroveonlineno1
Kupka, František [Frank]
(b Opočno, 22 Sept 1871; d Puteaux, Paris, 21 June 1957).Bohemian painter and graphic artist, active in France. A pioneer of European abstract painting, he first trained at the School of Arts and Crafts at Jaroměř under Alois Studnička (1842–1927). From 1887 until 1891 he studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts under Professor František Sequens (1836–96), a late Nazarene, who directed an atelier of religious painting. He continued his studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna (1892–3), under Professor August Eisenmenger (1830–1907). In 1894 he met the painter and natural philosopher Karl Diefenbach (b 1851), who impressed him with his ideas of a return to nature. Kupka’s paintings of this period (e.g. Quam ad causam sumus?, ?1894) are untraced. In 1895 he settled in Paris, earning his living as an illustrator for periodicals. In 1899 he exhibited a genre painting, the Bibliomaniac (Prague, N.G., Trade Fair Pal.), at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts without notable success. He first achieved fame with his satirical cycles in anarchistic style, Money, Religion, Peace (all Prague, N.G., Kinský Pal.), published as lithographs in the periodical L’Assiette au beurre between 1901 and 1904. At the beginning of the century he worked on a Symbolist cycle (1900–03; Prague, N.G., Trade Fair Pal.) in coloured aquatints: Defiance: Black Idol, Quiet Road and Beginning of Life. His Symbolist period culminated in Ballad: Joys of Life (1901–2; Prague, N.G., Trade Fair Pal.), in which elements of naturalism, Symbolism and the decorative stylization of the period were combined. In his preparatory drawings for the cycle the use of luminous colour makes the figures appear ethereal.
Between 1905 and 1910 Kupka produced illustrations for collectors’ editions of the Song of Songs, Les Erinnyes by Leconte de Lisle, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. In his painting, however, he developed along entirely different lines that led to avant-garde innovations. From 1910 he liberated colour by a method that could be seen as a rapprochement with Fauvism but was in fact a working out of his own understanding of the deeper, spiritual meaning of a work, which, in the context of Parisian modern painting, left him isolated. In Piano Keys: The Lake (1909; Prague, N.G., Trade Fair Pal.) the colours express his belief in the inner analogy between art and musical expression. First Step (1909–11; New York, MOMA) evokes a cosmological theme that was to become crucial in his overall plan to create a synthesis in painting. Kupka was aware that painting is not mere imitation or a fanciful interpretation of nature but a subjective transfiguration of nature into an ensemble of graphic and plastic elements and gradations of light and colour in order to create another reality. He effected the transfiguration of an object by diffusing its phases in vertical colour schemes, perhaps using a visual knowledge of motion acquired through the photography of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey (Rowell, 1975). The process recalls the experiments of the Futurists, who, unlike the Cubists, whom he rejected, never ceased to interest him. He always stressed the conceptual nature of art, and in this he was a representative of the tradition of the scholar artist who strives to find a scientific and theoretical basis for his work. He studied questions of colour in the light of optics, from Isaac Newton to Michel-Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood; he was interested in physiology, anthropology and many other fields, but always subjected such studies to his aesthetic concerns.
At the Salon d’Automne, 1912, Kupka exhibited his huge Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours (Prague, N.G., Trade Fair Pal.; for illustration see Orphism). It was the first manifesto of abstract art in Paris, and it was not fully understood even in avant-garde circles, dominated as they were by Cubism. In the same year he painted his Vertical Schemes (I: Paris, Pompidou), which Alfred H. Barr subsequently described as the first pure geometrical abstraction in modern painting. During 1912 Kupka found the basic motifs for his abstract painting, but his aim was to create rich formal syntheses or ‘symorphs’, consisting primarily of colourfully luminous shapes. His content was clearly cosmological. During the second decade of the century he was concerned with the theme of Cosmic Spring (I, II: Prague, N.G., Trade Fair Pal.), partly inspired by a study of biology and geology; the paintings are filled with the dynamic flowering of colourful forms that pass through continuous transformations and transmutations.
After World War I, in which he served as a volunteer in the Czech Legion fighting for the establishment of Czechoslovakia, Kupka sometimes recalled in his paintings the dynamic character of Bohemian radical Baroque, in their greater concentration and refinement of structure. Meanwhile he continued to use the motif of vertical schemes enriched by a complicated diagonal structure and also the motif of a circling movement, sometimes conveyed by the illusion of a downward spiral, at other times organized on a single plane as a multiform rotation about an imaginary point, as in Around a Point (1925–30; Paris, Pompidou). In 1919 Kupka was appointed professor at the Prague Academy, but he continued to work in Paris, where he taught Czechs and Slovaks on bursaries. His solo exhibitions in Paris in the Povolozka Gallery (1921) and Galerie La Boëtie (1925) did not achieve their expected success. It continued to be difficult to place Kupka among the prevailing avant-garde trends, mainly owing to the unusual combination of ornamental and ‘philosophical’ elements in his work. In the second half of the 1920s he attempted to draw closer to the contemporary world in a series of paintings evoking the dynamics of a modern steel machine and jazz rhythms (e.g. Machines, 1929–32; Prague, N.G., Trade Fair Pal.), but he remained dissatisfied with his efforts.
Kupka came closest to the avant-garde of the inter-war period when he became a founder-member of the Abstraction-Création group in 1931. At this time he evinced a certain purism, aptly expressed in a series of 26 woodcuts, Four Stories in Black and White (1926; Prague, N.G., Kinský Pal.), and in paintings in which his earlier riot of colour was reduced to red and blue against a white background in quiet, even surfaces. These paintings can be seen as a counterpart to contemporary avant-garde architecture; the painter’s aim, however, was primarily to express a state of harmony and balance, as in Eudia (1933; Prague, N.G., Trade Fair pal.). In 1936 he exhibited at the Musée du Jeu de Paume. During World War II he went into hiding at Beaugency. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 1946, and some 40 paintings were bought for what was intended to be a Kupka museum. In the same year he started exhibiting at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, where in 1953 he was given a room to himself. It was not until 1958, however, with the posthumous exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne that his life’s work was substantially re-evaluated and his importance as a painter fully recognized.
WRITINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PETR WITTLICH
From: http://www.groveart.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/shared/views/article.html?from=search&session_search_id=357343283&hitnum=1§ion=art.048316
okeeffegroveonline
O’Keeffe, Georgia
(b Sun Prairie, WI, 15 Nov 1887; d Santa Fe, NM, 6 March 1986).American painter and draughtsman. She decided to become an artist when she was 12. From 1905 to 1906 she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1907 she went to New York to study oil, pastel and watercolour painting at the Art Students League. She worked there for a year with William Merritt Chase and won the Chase Still Life Scholarship. In 1908 she saw the first American exhibitions of the work of Auguste Rodin (watercolours) and of Henri Matisse at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, known as 291, run by Alfred Stieglitz.
Between 1908 and 1910 O’Keeffe worked as a freelance commercial artist (drawing lace and embroidery advertisements) in Chicago. During summer 1912 she attended a drawing class run by Alon Bement (1876–1954) at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Through him she became interested in the anti-academic system of art education, developed by Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908) and Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) during the 1890s from Japanese principles of two-dimensional design. This system was saturated with Symbolist notions of ‘visual music’ and synaesthesia, and for the next six years O’Keeffe taught it at schools and colleges in Virginia, South Carolina and Texas.
O’Keeffe returned to New York in autumn 1914 to work for six months with Dow at the Teachers College, Columbia University. She became increasingly aware of European modernism, seeing work by Picasso, Georges Braque and Francis Picabia at 291. By summer 1915 she had twice read in translation Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Munich, 1912; Eng. trans. by M. T. H. Sadler as the Art of Spiritual Harmony (1914)) by Vasily Kandinsky, Cubism and Post-Impressionism by Arthur Jerome Eddy and issues of the magazines Camera Work and 291. In late 1915 she produced a breakthrough series of large charcoal abstractions (c. 625×225 mm) from, she said, the ‘things in my head’. Each of these gender-based expressions of self contain concrete, if unconscious, references to the plant and wave motifs of Art Nouveau, for example Special No. 9 (Houston, TX, Menil Col.). The organic geometries in this series—of ovoid, ellipse, vertical stalk, spiral, seedpod, tendril and arabesque—exist like armatures beneath her later landscapes, flowers, skyscrapers, stars, trees, Penitente crosses of the Hispanic Catholic fundamentalists, animal bones, mesas and clouds. Stieglitz saw the series in January 1916. Always in search of the new and determined to recognize and foster an indigenous American art, he exhibited them at 291 (23 May–5 July 1916). In 1917 he held a one-woman show of her work, which included several Texas landscape watercolours, including The Evening Star and Light Coming on the Plains series (e.g. Light Coming on the Plains II, 1917; Fort Worth, TX, Amon Carter Mus.)
O’Keeffe moved to New York in 1918 with the promise of Stieglitz’s financial support. They married in 1924, and he exhibited her work almost yearly in New York until his death in 1946. O’Keeffe became interested in the aesthetics of photography as a direct result of posing so often for Stieglitz’s camera. She also knew and valued the work of other important photographers associated with 291, especially Edward J. Steichen, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. In 1919, in such paintings as Fifty-ninth Street Studio (artist’s estate, see O’Keeffe, pl. 16) and Inside Red Canna (New York, Michael J. Scharf priv. col., see Callaway, 1987, pl. 7, p. 7), she started to isolate certain elements from the photographic process to serve a new goal: ‘objectivity’; these notably included cropped images, isolated detail, telephoto, magnified close-up and the lens malfunctions common to old view cameras such as convergence, halation and flare. She used them for abstraction and expression, however, not verisimilitude. The earliest large close-up flower painting was Petunia No. 2 (1924; Santa Fe, NM, Peters Gal.). Her New York cityscapes of the late 1920s contain the greatest array of photo-optic characteristics. The first, New York with Moon (1925; Lugano, Col. Thyssen-Bornemisza; see fig.), has a halating street lamp; in City Night (1926; Minneapolis, MN, Inst. A.) the leaning skyscrapers are extreme variations of convergence; The Shelton with Sunspots (1926; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.) is based on lens flare. Her original, metaphysical vision of city architecture may be characterized as urban sublime.
By 1925 O’Keeffe had developed a style from a unique amalgam of Symbolism, abstraction and photography. Few formal sketches are known to exist for her paintings, although she made many independent drawings of her subjects. She applied oil paint sparely and thinly, but the exquisite and subtle syntax of her facture may be seen in Black Iris III (1926) and Ranchos Church (1930; both New York, Met.). From 1929 she spent most summers painting in New Mexico, reinvigorating her art with the colours, forms and themes of the Southwest. Among the most original of these canvases are Black Cross, New Mexico (1929; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.), Summer Days (1936; priv. col., see the painter’s Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), pl. 7) and Pelvis with Shadow and Moon (1943; priv. col., see 1987 exh. cat.).
In 1949 O’Keeffe moved permanently to Abiquiu, formerly a Native American village, near Santa Fe. Her paintings from the 1950s and 1960s were, for the most part, reworkings of old ideas. In her long and, from 1971, blind old age she learnt to be a hand-potter. During her 98 years she received many honours and awards, including the American Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Arts.
WRITINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SARAH WHITAKER PETERS
From: http://www.groveart.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/shared/views/article.html?from=search&session_search_id=478899487&hitnum=1§ion=art.063367
CUCCHI enzo| Il vento dei galli neri [The wind of the black cocks]
![CUCCHI enzo| Il vento dei galli neri [The wind of the black cocks]](http://www.nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Images/MED/92052.jpg)
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From: http://www.artres.com/c/htm/CSearchT.aspx?V=CSearchT&SID=JMGEJND8M9BSZ&E=S_22SIJMYI87HFX
cucchienzogroveonline
Cucchi, Enzo
(b Morro d’Alba, nr Ancona, 14 Nov 1950).Italian painter, draughtsman and sculptor. He began exhibiting in 1977 after sporadic studies and established his reputation as a figurative painter belonging to the Transavanguardia with large oil paintings such as Ferocious Tongues (2.10×2.53 m) and A Painter’s Earth Paintings (2.01×2.19 m, both 1980; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.). These were characterized by an economical and simply rendered image, brilliant primary and secondary colours, bold draughtsmanship and abrupt shifts of scale. Motifs were often established in charcoal or pencil drawings as if by stream-of-consciousness, with waves, flames, skulls and roosters figuring prominently in his symbolic imagery. He consistently favoured a titanic scale, heavily textured surfaces and a fundamentally intuitive and anti-intellectual approach, portraying the universe in apocalyptic terms as a battlefield of elemental forces: light against dark, life and death, creation and destruction. The compressed and flattened space of his early paintings gave way to illusions of deep, cavernous space, for example in imaginary landscapes such as the Flourishing of the Black Rooster (1983; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.); such works also introduced earthy browns, deep greys, velvety blacks and brilliant whites as well as an almost Caravaggesque sense of dramatic light effects. On occasion he incorporated elements made of iron, neon tubing or burnt wood, as in Prehistoric Dawn (oil on canvas with wood element, 1983; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.); he also created a few sculptures, such as Untitled (bronze, 1.2×2.0×10.0 m, 1985; Humlebæk, Louisiana Mus.), a huge, essentially flat shape that gives the impression of having been poured on to its outdoor site.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
MONICA BOHM-DUCHEN
From: http://www.groveart.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/shared/views/article.html?from=search&session_search_id=855451186&hitnum=1§ion=art.020566
cecilcollinsgroveonline
Collins, Cecil
(b Plymouth, 23 March 1908; d London, 4 June 1989).English painter and designer. He started drawing his native Devon landscape at an early age, studying at Plymouth School of Art from 1923 to 1927 and at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1927 to 1931, in both cases on a scholarship. His student work, although suggesting something of his later desire to probe beyond appearances, remained essentially naturalistic. In the early 1930s he began to be influenced by Klee, Picasso and briefly by European Surrealism. His first one-man exhibition was held at the Bloomsbury Gallery, London, in 1935, and in 1936 he participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition, London. He soon, however, forswore any formal allegiance to the Surrealist movement, thereafter remaining a somewhat isolated and solitary figure within the British art world, although he is often labelled a Neo-Romantic.
In 1938 Collins met the American artist Mark Tobey, who nurtured his growing interest in Far Eastern art and philosophy. Between 1939 and 1943 he taught at Dartington Hall, Devon. He disdained the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’, concerned as he was with visionary experience and a spiritual quest. He embodied these ideas in archetypal figures such as the Fool, a character that had unequivocally Christian associations in Collins’s work; the Angel; and the Soul or Anima, inspired to a large extent by his wife Elizabeth. Paintings such as The Sleeping Fool (1943; London, Tate) formed part of a prolonged visual meditation on a theme on which he also published a book, The Vision of the Fool (London, 1947), which he had begun writing in 1943 and in which he explored the relationship of the creative artist and mankind in general to an increasingly mechanized and dehumanizing modern environment. Many of his pictures of the early 1940s reveal a debt to the mystic pastoral vision of Samuel Palmer; slightly later influences include Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau and (to a lesser extent) Max Ernst.
Collins’s typical mature work consists both of hieratic, linear, icon-like images such as The Sleeping Fool, the fruit of long thought and elaborate preparation, and of more spontaneous, painterly images such as The Golden Wheel (1958; London, Tate), the latter becoming more in evidence in the late 1950s under the influence of Abstract Expressionism. In 1949 he produced his first tapestry, which was made for the Edinburgh Tapestry Company, and from 1954 he designed fabrics for the Edinburgh Weavers. A commission for The Shakespeare Curtain (Washington, DC, Brit. Embassy) followed in 1959. Later commissions included an altarpiece, The Icon of Divine Light (1973; Chichester, Cathedral). A retrospective exhibition of his prints was held in 1981 (London, Tate), which was followed by one of his drawings and paintings (1989; London, Tate).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
MONICA BOHM-DUCHEN
From: http://www.groveart.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/shared/views/article.html?from=search&session_search_id=891049743&hitnum=1§ion=art.018628
cecilcollinswww.aidanarticons.com/articles/icons
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cecilcollinsneo-romantic.org.uk
The Great Happiness (1965).
Kathleen Raine. Cecil Collins: Painter of Paradise (1979)
From: http://www.neo-romantic.org.uk/ent-collins.html
cecilcollins BBC bequest 2001
| Friday, 2 March, 2001, 12:14 GMT
Artist's £1m works left to the nation
 The Tate Gallery staged Collins' major exhibitions
A major collection of paintings by visionary British artist Cecil Collins, valued at £1m, has been given to the nation.
The 250 works, including the entire contents of his studio at the time of his death, will go to museums and galleries around the UK. Collins, who was born in 1908 and died in 1989, was an individualist who favoured symbolic and mystical subjects. His works were passed on to the National Art Collections Fund after the death of his wife, Elisabeth, last year.
The fund is a charity which helps museums and galleries buy artworks to add to their collections. Several of Collins' works are expected to end up in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate and the V & A. Collins, who was made an MBE in 1979, lived in a small flat in London's Chelsea and supported himself by teaching at the Central School of Art and at Dartington College. His wife Elisabeth was also a gifted artist but mostly dedicated her life to supporting her husband. Late recognition His works were recognised at a retrospective of his prints the Tate Gallery in 1981, and at one of his paintings and drawings in 1989, just three weeks before he died. Collins was an eccentric in his personal life with an idiosyncratic teaching style. During his 58-year marriage his wife was the model for most of his female images. The bequest is likely to revive further interest in Collins' work. "After his death Collins has become very fashionable," said a spokesman for the National Arts Collections Fund.
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okeefenewsartinfosept2107
New Mexico Museum Drops Claim for O'Keeffe Painting, Collection
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Digg thisThe Santa Fe museum moved to withdraw its lawsuit Tuesday, one day after a judge denied a settlement agreement that would have sent a prominent O'Keeffe painting to the museum for $7.5 million.
The 1927 oil painting called Radiator Building Night, New York is part of the collection given to the historically black university in 1949 by the estate of O'Keeffe's husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
The withdrawal opens the door to a $30 million offer made by the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., late last month to share a 50 percent stake in the collection and to display it half of the time.
The Crystal Bridges Museum was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of the late Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, and is scheduled to open in 2009.
Fisk University was founded in 1866 to educate former slaves, but the school has struggled throughout its history to raise money and nearly closed 20 years ago because of lack of funding.
The New Mexico museum, which represents the late painter's estate, had sued the school because it said Fisk was violating the conditions of the O'Keeffe gift by trying to sell some of the paintings and by not displaying the collection. Saul Cohen, chairman of the museum's board, could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
If Fisk had lost its case at trial, the entire collection could have been awarded to the museum. A spokesman for the school did not immediately return a call Tuesday.
A Nashville judge denied a proposed settlement to send Radiator Building to the New Mexico museum and to allow Fisk to sell a second work by American modernist Marsden Hartley on the open market.
The state Attorney General's Office had argued that the proposed settlement would have accomplished the very thing the museum had sought to prevent in breaking up the collection.
"Ms. Walton's proposal, even at this preliminary stage, is clearly superior to the O'Keeffe Museum settlement agreement," Attorney General Bob Cooper said in statement. "But we will not be in a position to support or oppose the proposal until there are more specifics."
From: http://www.artinfo.com/articles/story/25612/new_mexico_museum_drops_claim_for_okeeffe_painting_collection
cucchiartdailyjuly1907
Thanks to the elaborate and large selection of the artists and the quality of the works, the exhibition qualifies as one of the most important displays of Italian art outside of Italy of the last decade.
Demetrio Paparoni is an acclaimed art historian, art critic, curator and writer of several theoretical works on contemporary art. In the 1980s he created the magazine Tema Celeste, that he directed for more than 20 years and in 1993 he was appointed commissioner for the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Paparoni also teaches History of Contemporary Art at Catania University and has recently curated TIMER, a major exhibition of contemporary art at the Milan Triennale.
Italian Mentalscapes analyzes the spirit of Italian contemporary art and is conceived as a path through which all the works are connected to one another, grouped according to specific themes not necessarily following a chronological order.
The curator has divided the exhibition in three sections: literary metaphysics, analytical metaphysics and tragic-ironic metaphysics. This classification allows for an original identification of the characteristics that distinguish the Italian contemporary art, celebrating its uniqueness.
Italian Mentalscapes focuses from the Seventies until today, but it will also present older works. Three major works will open each of its sections: a work of Giorgio De Chirico for the “literary metaphysics”, one of Giorgio Morandi for the “analytical metaphysics” and one of Alberto Savinio for the “tragic-ironic.” Although the exhibition begins with the Arte Povera (poor art), it will display the works of artists from previous decades whose teachings have had a strong impact on the development of the Italian contemporary identity (Giorgio De Chirico, Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni.)
The exhibition and the catalogue will highlight the works belonging to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s collection (Piero Manzoni, Mimmo Palladino, Enzo Cucchi, Sandro Chia, Claudio Parmiggiani). Many of the works were donated by Arturo Schwarz, a strong supporter of this initiative. Particular attention will also be given to the works of Israeli private galleries and private collectors.
The sections are divided as follows:
Literary metaphysics: (Giorgio De Chirico), Giovanni Anselmo, Gabriele Basilico, Vanessa Beecroft, Domenico Bianchi, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Paolo Canevari, Maurizio Cattelan, Francesco Clemente, Roberto Cuoghi, Nicola De Maria, Jannis Kounellis, Eva Marisaldi, Masbedo, Fausto Melotti, Mario Merz, Nunzio, Giulio Paolini, Claudio Parmiggiani, Paola Pivi, Ettore Spalletti, Grazia Toderi.
Analytical metaphysics: (Giorgio Morandi), Stefano Arienti, Enrico Castellani, Lucio Fontana, Francesco Gennari, Giuseppe Gabellone, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Giuseppe Uncini, Gilberto Zorio.
Tragic irony: (Alberto Savinio), Bertozzi e Casoni, Alighiero Boetti, Monica Bonvicini, Loris Cecchini, Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Gino De Dominicis, Luciano Fabbro, Mimmo Jodice, Piero Manzoni, Liliana Moro, Luigi Ontani, Mario Schifano, Mimmo Paladino, Francesco Vezzoli.
In his introductory note in the catalogue, Arturo Schwarz, one of the most renowned contemporary art historian and a strong supporter of this initiative, writes that “Mentalscapes presents artists which are familiar to the international arena but also allows for an original critical vision of Italian art by highlighting the origins of the metaphysical thought that developed in the beginning of the 1900 with Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Savinio and more.” Schwarz also adds that “The title of the exhibition, Italian Mentalscapes, was born in the cafeteria of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art during a meeting between Mordechai Omer, Director of the Museum, Demetrio Paparoni, curator of the exhibition and Simonetta Della Seta, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute. It was Mordechai Omer’s intuition that led to the invention of a new word that would synthesize the spirit of the initiative. The translation into Italian in Mentalgrafie is by Giuseppe Conte, one of the most influential Italian poets.
One of the most important aspects at the basis of the project of Italian Mentalscapes is the idea that the exhibition should be a meeting point between the Italian and Israeli cultures as both countries are increasingly aware of the importance and necessity of dialogue between people.
The exhibition opens with a self-portrait of Francesco Clemente (self-portraits, which are a theme dear to De Chirico, are the symbolic affirmations of our own identity) and ends with 10 Insects to Feed by Masbedo, a large work created specifically for the Museum’s wall that displays a video (now part of the Museum’s collection as a donation by Arturo Schwarz.) The video deals with the theme of the West’s fear of fear and its negative effects on the defense of democracy. Another significant work is Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Love Difference”: a large table surrounded with several chairs originating from various countries. With this work Pistoletto - who was recently awarded the Wolf Prize- offers a meeting place for exchanging ideas between people of different cultures and ethnicities, ready to sit at the same table with a mindset of “love difference.”
At the conclusion of its stay in Israel, Italian Mentalscapes will be displayed in Athens, Istanbul and Ankara.
From: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=20895
