Italian Art & Architecture - Italy - page 1806

movement and with modern technology and life. While the movement lost its own im-
petus with the outbreak of WWI, its legacy has been revived with Milan's Museo del
Novecento. Dedicated to 20th-century art, the museum houses what is arguably Italy's
finest collection of futurist works.
Like futurism, Metaphysical painting also had a short life. Its most famous exponent,
Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), lost interest in the style after the war, but his work held a
powerful attraction for the surrealist movement that developed in France in the 1920s.
Stillness and a sense of foreboding are the haunting qualities of many of De Chirico's
works of this period, which show disconnected images from the world of dreams in set-
tings that usually embody memories of classical Italian architecture. A good example is
The Red Tower (1913), now in Venice's Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
After the war, a number of the futurist painters began to flirt with Fascism, believing
that the new state offered opportunities for patronage and public art and that Italy could
once again lead the world in its arts practice. This period was known as 'second futurism'
and its main exponents were Mario Sironi (1885-1961) and Carlo Carrà (1881-1966).
The Italian equivalent of Impressionism was the Macchiaioli movement based in Florence. Its
major artists were Telemaco Signorini (1835-1901) and Giovanni Fattori (1825-1908). See
their work in the Palazzo Pitti's Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Florence.
The local art scene became more interesting in the 1950s, when artists such as Alberto
Burri (1915-95) and the Argentine-Italian Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) experimented with
abstract art. Fontana's punctured canvases were characterised by spazialismo (spatialism)
and he also experimented with 'slash paintings', perforating his canvases with actual holes
or slashes and dubbing them 'art for the space age'.
Burri's work was truly cutting edge. His assemblages were made of burlap, wood, iron
and plastic and were avowedly anti-traditional. Grande sacco (Large Sack) of 1952,
housed in Rome's Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, caused a major
controversy when it was first exhibited.
In the 1960s, a radical new movement called Arte Povera (Poor Art) took off. Its fol-
lowers used simple materials to trigger memories and associations. Major names include
Mario Merz (1925-2003), Giovanni Anselmo (b 1934), Luciano Fabro (b 1936-2007),
Giulio Paolini (b 1940) and Greek-born Jannis Kounellis (b 1936). All experimented with
sculpture and installation work.