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Italian Art in the 20th Century: A Conference On 8-9 February a conference entitled Italian Art in the 20th Century was held in the Hermitage Theatre to mark the opening in the museum of the exhibition Futurism. The Novecento. Abstraction. Italian Art of the 20th century. During the four sessions of the conference, sixteen reports were presented, dealing with both theoretical issues in the study of Italian art from the last century and also concrete aspects of the work of artists from this country. At the opening of the conference, Deputy Director of the State Hermitage V. Yu. Matveev and General Consul of the Italian Republic Marco Ricci delivered words of greetings. Among those who spoke at the conference were such well known Italian scholars as Nico Stringa (Universita di Ca' Foscari, Venice), who drew attention to à unique group of artists working in Venice during the first half of the 20th century, and Maria Vera Cresti (Universita di Roma Tre, Rome), who talked about the evolution in the work of Gino Severini from Futurism to Classicism. Gabriela Belli, director of the Museum of Modern Art of Trento and Rovereto, and one of the organizers of the exhibition, delivered an extensive survey of the processes which took place in Italian art during the first half of the 20th century. A significant number of reports were devoted to the role of tradition in 20th century Italian art. The influence of Antiquity on the work of De Chirico and Savinio was demonstrated by N.V. Getashvili (Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Russian State University of the Humanities, Moscow). E.B. Korobova (Hermitage) made interesting comparisons between the etchings of G.-B Bracelli and the art of the avant-garde, in particular with works shown in the exhibition. Another Hermitage staff member, E.V. Tarakanova, spoke about the way Achille Funi's work exemplifies the interaction between the Novecento and artistic traditions. In a similarly specific manner M.A. Chekmareva (Hermitage) showed the role of personages from Commedia dell'Arte in the art of Gino Severini, while N.B. Demina (Hermitage) spoke about the links between the art and theoretical views of Carlo Carra and Andre Derain. I.D. Sablin (Russian Institute of the History of the Arts, St Petersburg) devoted his report to the major Italian aesthetician B. Croce. Hermitage researcher D. Yu Ozerkov's report on "The Modernist Myth in the Art of Italy and Russia" also was of a theoretical nature. The report of St Petersburg Academy of Arts docent I.A. Dorochenkov is worthy of special mention. He studied in detail the question of how Italian art was viewed by Soviet art critics in the 1920's and 1930's. The conference ended with two reports devoted to art phenomena that arose at the end of the 20th century. O.I. Luzina (Hermitage) spoke in her theoretical report about the influence of the Renaissance on the structure of art's modern existence, while Z.V. Kuptsova (Hermitage) analyzed one specific current – the Trans-Avant-Garde. There are plans to make the full texts of the reports available in a
special volume of conference materials that will be published at the end
of the year. |
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