Word: palazzos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...summer (or 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...
...Representation of Space" has some painstaking reconstructions of spatial illusion in Renaissance and baroque art; its best moment (which will be the envy of all red-blooded interior decorators) is a full-size wooden replica of Borromini's false-perspective colonnade, made in the 17th century for the Palazzo Spada in Rome. The second exhibition, "Wunderkammer," is a delight. Wunderkammern--literally, chambers of astonishment--were an embellishment of European collections from the 16th century onward. They were anthologies of real and artificial oddities, things astonishing by their exoticism or the intricacy of their making--or outright fakes, like a dead...
Valentino is not the only Roman offended by the huge fast-food emporium, which is located in the heart of the Eternal City. But he is affected more than most because the flues from the kitchen exhaust are directly below the studio windows of his six-story palazzo. The complaint is scheduled to go to court this week. "The whole building smells like a fast-food joint," says Valentino's lawyer. McDonald's owner, Jacques Bahbout, is unhappy about the flap and insists that he is willing to make changes without being dragged into court. Says...