Word: grassy
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...indeed anywhere else) should be a giant display of futurist paintings, sculpture, books, pamphlets, posters and memorabilia in a palace, no longer tottering, on the Grand Canal. Titled "Futurismo & Futurismi" ("Futurism and Its Offshoots," more or less), the exhibition marks the opening of the Societa per Azioni Palazzo Grassi (Grassi Palace Society for Actions), housed in an 18th century structure whose restoration and conversion was brilliantly carried out by the Milanese architect Gae Aulenti. The new museum, lavishly funded by Fiat, is run by Pontus Hulten, former director of the Pompidou Center in Paris...
With its dignified rooms, passing from grand to aedicular scale and back again, Palazzo Grassi is an excellent place to look at art. The show has art and a good deal else, including such totems of futurist affection as a 1911 Bleriot monoplane and a World War I Spad hanging from the cortile roof, and a vintage Bugatti by the canal entrance, to remind one of Marinetti's belligerent and much quoted dictum that "a roaring motorcar that seems to run ( on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace...
...paintings, like the famous Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, are virtually straight renderings of multiple-exposure photographs. But in his series of paintings inspired by a Fiat speeding down the Via Veneto, the game gets more complex. Nearly all of this series is assembled at Palazzo Grassi, culminating in Balla's Abstract Speed, 1913, one of the few large futurist paintings that can be called a pictorial masterpiece, a thundering black Doppler-effect image in which the shapes of wheel, mudguard and driver dissolve in and out of the shuttling buildings...
There are two outstanding exhibitions this year. One is historical: "The Arts in Vienna from the Founding of the Secession to the Fall of the Hapsburg Empire," a stupendous collocation of more than a thousand objects that fills the Palazzo Grassi: paintings by Klimt and Schiele, furniture by Hoffman and Moser, posters, stage designs, textiles, jewelry, ceramics by dozens of artists both famous and obscure. Apart from Venice itself, this is the main reason for going to Venice. The other is a one-man show by Howard Hodgkin at the English pavilion. Not since Robert Rauschenberg's appearance...
...Sabino Grassi...