The Making of our Exhibition: Thinking through Images (and Words)

Our project exhibition presented more than one challenge. We had a big idea, a small budget, and a physical space to house the images, words, and objects that would allow us to tell the story of The Making of Modern Italy: Art and Design in the early 1960s. The project required a different way of thinking from our more traditional research outputs. Collaboration was key: we have been fortunate to work with both the curatorial team at the Estorick Collection and a crew of young film-makers who brought another media dimension to the project.

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.