In the months that lead up to the making of the exhibition, we kept producing words, and the curators at the Estorick Collection gently kept steering us towards images. We knew the story we wanted to tell; we had the words for it, but a gallery space needs words and images, as the story is created at the intersection of the two.

The pivotal moment was an article in Life magazine, published in December 1961, illustrated with photographs by Mark Kauffman, showing models dressed in the latest Italian fashions set against thoroughly modern backdrops: Florence’s modernist Santa Maria Novella railway station, Gio Ponti’s iconic Pirelli building in Milan, and the Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin. The image of Italy presented by Life was that of an uncompromisingly modern country in which design, architecture, fashion and the visual arts worked in synergy, contributing to a radical stylistic transformation of the world.

As the search for images and objects continued, the story we wanted to tell began to take shape as research took us to the RIBA (to look at copies of Domus and Casabella), Tate Library (a hidden gem tucked away inside Tate Britain, with an impressive collection of 20^th-century Italian art volumes and exhibition catalogues), and the Fornasetti archive and store (a place of whimsy and playful imagination).

The story of Italy’s postwar economic recovery is well-known. The period of the so-called ‘economic miracle’ continues to look extraordinary: the pace and size of industrial growth in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s was unprecedented and remarkable by international standards. What is less well-known is the specific contribution of the art and design sector to Italy’s development during this time. Yet it was significant, and because of its close links with industry, it allows us to reconsider the role played by the arts more broadly in the economic recovery and refashioning of the country.

L'articolo The Making of our Exhibition: Thinking through Images (and Words) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

A display curated by Giuliana Pieri at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London (29 January-7 April) is one of the ways in which Interdisciplinary Italy is reaching out to a wider public interested in exploring modern Italian art and culture. The show focuses on the country’s new post-war identity, considering the role played by those artists and designers who worked across different disciplines, contributing to the fundamental transformation of Italian culture and its reception abroad. Art, fashion, design, craft and architecture come together under one roof in Gallery 4 at the Estorick Collection to help us rethink the way the arts contributed to economic and social change in post-war Italy.

[You can watch a short video about the exhibition at the following link]

During the 1950s, a special relationship developed between Italian architects, designers, industrial manufacturers, and mechanical and chemical industries. This collaborative approach was at the roots of the success of Italian industrial design in the 1960s – designers and architects being given the opportunity to experiment with new materials, new ideas and a wide range of disciplines. In the inter-war period, a handful of Italian companies such as Campari, Olivetti and Pirelli had already used this model, and continued to be protagonists of Italian innovation in forging close links between industry and design. However, the interdisciplinary approach typical of the post-war period had also characterised Italian avant-garde practice during the early years of the twentieth century, and could even be said to have been rooted in Italy’s distinguished cultural traditions, personified by the figure of the Renaissance polymath. 

Images from Life, American Vogue, and Domus magazine sit alongside works by of Piero Fornasetti, Emilio Pucci, Gio Ponti and Fausto Melotti–who is the focus of the main show in Gallery 1 and 2, titled Fausto Melotti: Counterpoint. The display retains the flavour of the mood-boards we created at the start of the exhibition project: iconic images of 1960s Italy, key protagonists and concepts, and key design pieces (including ceramic plates from Fornasetti, Pucci printed silks, and an Olivetti typewriter).

We are planning a series of dedicated educational activities for schools and universities. If you are interested, get in touch with us. Florian Mussgnug and Giuliana Pieri will also be giving gallery talks on Melotti in the coming months.

L'articolo The Making of Modern Italy: Art and Design in the Early 1960s sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Tate Exchange: ‘a space for everyone to collaborate, test ideas and discover new perspectives on life, through artâ€.

The Sixth Form College in Farnborough (Surrey) has one of the largest cohorts of History students in the UK. Their Modern History Department is committed to widening the students†understanding of history as a site of cross-disciplinary encounters. Equally inspired and innovative is the approach of the Art History Department at Queen Margaretâ€s, York. A shared passion for widening the boundaries of disciplinary teaching was the platform for the collaborative project. An unexpected fourth party joined us half way through the project and was responsible for some of the stunning visuals of the workshop. Farnboroughâ€s brilliant Design Department came on board and worked with students before and on the day to produce Futurist-inspired visuals and a pop-up exhibition.

The premises were simple. Both A-level History and Art History students studied Italian Futurism as an example of Italian early 20^th-century nationalism and the birth of the European Avant-Garde respectively. The historians were interested in the politics of Futurism and its links with the rise of the Italian Fascist movement. The Art Historians focused on the stylistic features of the movement and read the founding manifesto of Futurism as a means to engage with the thematic choices of artists such as Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni. Design students looked at the graphic work of the Futurists and found inspiration in the typographic innovations of the Italian avant-garde movement. Students at Royal Holloway University of London encounter Futurism at different levels of study and pay special attention to the manifestos as a literary form.

What would happen if we brought them all together and asked them to share their disciplinary perspectives? Would their understanding of the movement change? Would the effect be illuminating or confusing? Would the disciplinary gap be as alarming as that faced by tube passengers in London when they are reminded to ‘mind the gap� Our experience points in an entirely positive direction. Students were given a small selection of art works, timelines, and brief extracts from the manifestos. They were asked to look at them from their own disciplinary perspective. This would preserve disciplinary expertise.  Tate Exchange acted as a theatre of exchange. Students presented their research, shared their disciplinary expertise, and had a chance to reflect on how differing disciplinary perspectives further knowledge and challenge disciplinary norms and orthodoxies. The point is not to lose or dilute disciplinary expertise but to add a layer of understanding and complexity. This is not a call for the creation of know-it-all generalists. Our idea is that schools and universities can work together to nurture disciplinary experts who are able to ask the right questions that open up their own discipline to other perspectives. The aim is to foster collaboration, knowledge exchange and the co-production of knowledge.

L'articolo Mind the Gap: Interdisciplinarity in the Secondary and University Classroom sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Join us in London, at Tate Modern, on Monday 13 February for an interactive workshop on Italian Futurism. The event is part of Interdisciplinarity in the classroom, a range of projects and activities with teachers and schools which will take place throughout the life of Interdisciplinary Italy and beyond.

When Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism, in 1909, he put Italy back on the map of European and International art and culture. Of course Italy had a very illustrious cultural tradition: it had been for centuries a place of undisputed excellence in the arts and a major contributor to European literature, thought and science. Yet, Marinetti and the Futurists rejected, in often belligerent terms, Italy’s past, or better, they pointed out that modern Italy had much to offer and that focusing exclusively on Italy’s past contributed to the idea that Italy was a land of the past, a living museum.

The Futurists proclaimed their love of speed, technology, youth, and violence. They turned objects such as cars and aeroplanes into the beauty icons of the new age. They sang the excitement of life in the new industrial cities, teaming with masses of people. They also, importantly, aimed to reach out to the masses. Art and culture for the Futurists were not the preserve of a small elite. The Italian Futurists wanted to engage with a much larger public. The arts were seen as highly relevant to politics because they were best placed to exercise a positive power over society; they were the vehicle through which to engage the masses; and they had the potential to affect radical change.

Above all the Futurists called for sweeping changes; they wanted to transform the universe as they knew it. The manifesto published in March 11, 1915, and entitled “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” is a good example of this. In this manifesto, and in many others, the Futurists offer us a vision of transformation and radical innovation that touched all artistic disciplines and reached out to the world of science and technology.

Yet, even when approaching a movement so openly and programmatically interartistic, we still tend to study it by focusing on single disciplines and from individual disciplinary perspectives. A small-scale interdisciplinary project led by Prof Giuliana Pieri, Dr David Brown (The Sixth Form College Farnborough) and Mr Thomas Cooke (Queen Margaret’s School, York) aims precisely at showing that boundaries between disciplines need not be an obstacle but can be used as an advantage for some innovative classroom activities and collaboration between schools, departments within schools, and universities.

The students who are taking part in this project, and who will attend a workshop at Tate Modern on Monday 13 February, have been studying Italian Futurism from a multiplicity of perspectives and for different reasons. Historians from Farnborough encounter Futurism when they study the roots of Italian nationalism and the rise of the Fascist movement. Students of art history at Queen Margaret’s engage with Futurism when they study early 20^th-century Avant-Garde movements. Students at Royal Holloway in the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, encounter Futurism in their study of Fascist Italy, and at specialist final year level in a course on European art and culture in the period between1880-1940.

The workshop at Tate will offer us a forum for discussion, a space in which we can exchange ideas and perspectives. To find out more about this event and for details to attend the session, which is open to all, follow this link.

Keep following us on these webpages over the next few weeks and read more about Interdisciplinary Futurism, from the teachers and students who took part. And if you like the idea and would like to get involved contact us. We have resources and ideas that we can share with you and your school.

L'articolo Interdisciplinary Futurism at Tate Modern sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The association between colour and music is linked to theories of colour and emotion that were much discussed in avant-garde circles at the time. These same theories also gave birth to one of the modernist masterpieces on the relationship between colour and music, Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43 (MOMA, New York). Mondrian’s painting was the visual translation of his encounter with the city of New York and jazz music. Russolo’s Music can also be described as an encounter or, to use Russolo’s term, a translation of sorts.

In 1920, in the Futurist journal Poesia, Russolo described the painting as “a kind of pictorial translation of the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, polyphonic and chromatic impressions forming the complex musical emotion”. Russolo asks us to focus on the boundary between the aural and the visual by exploring the commonalities between music and painting. Russolo also interestingly uses the concept of translation as a metaphor for artistic and interartistic exchange.

As Florian Mussgnug has noted in another post on our site (7 December 2015, Elephants in the Dark: Towards a theory of Interartistic Practice), translation in the 21^st century has emerged as a powerful metaphor for cultural and artistic exchange. Russolo shows us that a century earlier the same concept was used to reflect on the encounters between the arts. Translation was the metaphor and the tool which helped to formulate new artistic theories and new practices of interartistic exchange.

One key Futurist principle is central to Russolo’s painting: dynamism. Closely bound to this is also the idea of synaesthesia, which became a central preoccupation for the Futurists in their attempt to break the boundaries of tradition and meaning. Music for Russolo is rhythm and harmony but it is also pattern and colour, and so it is closely linked to painting. La musica has always seemed to me to capture the embodied experience of both music and painting. Russolo describes the impression music leaves on the body as chromatic. It is this visual essence of music that allows the boundary between the two arts to dissolve. What Russolo seems to suggest is that if music is experienced by our bodies as colour, in turn colour and pattern in painting are essentially linked to rhythm and sound.

In 1913, Russolo’s theories developed further. Music was replaced by the art of noises, in an attempt to go beyond the limitations of music and traditional musical training, whilst recapturing the primordial and essential power of sound.

Further reading:

More than Meets the Eye. New Research on the Estorick Collection, cat. of the exhibition (London, Estorick Collection, 2015).

L'articolo Interartistic Exchange in Luigi Russolo’s La Musica sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

During Phase 1 of the project, we held our first workshop in New York (Casa Italiana/NYU, New York, 22 February 2013) focusing on Italian Interdisciplinary Modernism. Here was an attempt on our part to grapple with disciplinary constructions of meaning and to reflect on what constitutes modernism in Italy. A number of questions emerged: why is modernism a less established category in the context of the study of Italian cultural production? Does modernism mean different things if one looks at it from differing artistic and disciplinary perspectives? How useful is it to focus on continuity and/or discontinuity when looking at this multifaceted movement? Finally, and more crucially for our project, what happens if we focus on those cultural products and practitioners who crossed multiple mediatic and artistic barriers?
If we look at the interplay between the built-environment, fashion, design and the visual arts, the dazzling complexity of influences and porosity of boundaries becomes apparent. Domus magazine (1928-), since the late 1920s and 1930s, under the editorship of Gio Ponti, was responsible for the diffusion in Italy of the lexicon of international modernist design and architecture. Photography, in the pages of specialist and more popular magazines, played a major role in visualising modernist buildings, interiors, and art works. Art journals in interwar Italy embraced avant-garde art and were thoroughly up-to-date on the contemporary art scene in Western Europe. Countless Italian artists, since the fin-de-siècle, spent considerable periods of time in Paris, the unrivalled centre of the international avant-garde, and were thus able to act as cultural mediators of international modernism back in Italy. Elsa Schiapparelli, arguably the most important modernist fashion designer, belongs to this group of international modernists who crossed artistic and medial boundaries as seamlessly as they did national barriers. Emilio Pucci, whose garments in the post-war period were the antithesis of the still heavily corseted elegance of post-war Parisian couture, grew up close to Florentine Futurism and was heavily influenced by Futurist art and fashion (Emily Braun, “Making Waves”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 20:1, 2015).

Yet, too often we tend not to focus on this complexity of artistic exchange; we remain reluctant to crossing disciplinary boundaries. If modernism can still teach us something it is that boundaries are there to be crossed, fearlessly if possible.

L'articolo Modernism / Modernisms sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.