Painting in Italy 1910s-1950s: Futurism, Abstraction, Concrete Art

• Edited by Gian Enzo Sperone, Tania Pistone
• Contributors Testi di Maria Antonella Pelizzari
• Size 23x28 cm
• Binding Cartonato con sovraccoperta
• Pages 392
• Illustrations 297
• Language Italian, English
• Year 2016
• ISBN 9780982848142
• Price € 100,00
•   Not available

Essential for the 20th-century Italian art: the utopia of abstract painting in Italy

For forty years, abstract painting, both geometric and biomorphic, remained the “inconvenient relative” of modern art in Italy, in continuous competition with figurative art, with both the classicism of the 20th century during the Fascist period and the communist-inspired social realism in the post-war period. The book brings together the various expressions of abstract art in Italy, opening up a new view of the history of painting in Europe and in the United States in the interwar and immediate post-war period.This controversial history is marked by three periods: the '10s, when two masters (Giacomo Balla and Enrico Prampolini) embraced the Futurist revolution, inventing forms of abstraction that evolved into various forms of Futurism; the '30s, when Italian abstract painting found a theoretical formulation in Carlo Belli's book Kn (1935), while an opposition of Italian and foreign artists exhibited at the Galleria del Milione in Milan, in various ways negotiating the industrial culture and political pressures of Fascism; and finally, the immediate post-war period through the end of the '50s, when abstract and concrete art movements became the mouthpiece of cultural renewal and engagement, becoming antagonistic to the ideologies favourable to realism.