Word: italians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many of the pieces on display portray the splendor and glory of the reign of Suleyman I (1520-1566). The collection presents portraits of the emperor as he was perceived by resident European artists in the Turkish court. An anonymous Italian woodcutting shows the ruler's strong profile, adorned by an incredibly ornate hat. Next to the Italian woodcutting are several engravings by the German artist Melchior Lorichs, who lived in the Ottoman court. Like the Italian piece, Lorichs' works show the monarch surrounded by temporal and religious glory. He appears to be grim and strong-willed; in "Suleyman...
...Italian avant-garde before World War I, where this show begins, found itself in a fix under the immense shadow of its own cultural history. Either it made a diverting Oedipal commotion about the loathsome oppressiveness of the past, like the futurists, or immersed itself in poignant reveries about its authoritarian and alienating beauty, like Giorgio de Chirico and his associates in metaphysical painting...
...Chirico's dreaming, spatially deceitful piazzas and arcades, with their phallic locomotives and long-shadowed statues, had an immense resonance both inside and outside Italy. Their influence on surrealism was crucial, but their reveries about past and present, nature and culture, memory and desire also hover behind much Italian art from the '60s to the '80s, such as the richly metaphoric sculptures of Giovanni Anselmo or even (more distantly) the structures of Mario Merz...
...whole, the rooms devoted to 1910-35 are the best. The show does a particular service by exhuming the impressive work of Mario Sironi (1885-1961) and, at long last, intelligently describing the relations between Italian modernists and Fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The pieties of art politics, up to the present, have tended to discourage this, since the arrival of Mussolini was greeted with rapture by so many leading artists and intellectuals. The Fascist rhetoric of dynamism and machine efficiency meshed with (and was partly inspired by) that of futurism; while the Duce's promise of a renewed...
...show at London's Royal Academy of Arts surveys the systole and diastole of innovation and tradition that shaped 20th century Italian modernism...