“Poi, come s’uno schermo”: Modernist Poetry and Cinema
Adorno, Kracauer, Ortega y Gasset: these are just a few of the thinkers who, at the turn of the 20th Century, expressed critical views on cinema and the way it affects its...
Category Archives: Modernism
Ornament as Crime: Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Sociology of Fashion
In Carlo Emilio Gadda’s modernist works, dress never constitutes a merely instrumental element of narrative. Rather, it serves to reflect the social habitus of a character, or its very habits of being....
Verga and Duse: Shaping an Italian Identity on Stage
My contribution at the recent Interart/Intermedia conference looked at the interartistic collaboration between Verga and Duse and the effect their collaboration had on Italy’s artistic creativity: observations which have been inspired by...
Modernist Art during the Catastrophe: The Italian Premiere of Bartók’s Ballet ‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ in 1942
‘How dangerously blurring would it be […] if the Nazi heart had the cheek or the hypocrisy even to beat for Franz Marc or, in another field, for Bartók […]. The fact that...
Material and Intellectual Lightness: Reading Bruno Munari à la Calvino
A new publication about the Milanese artist Bruno Munari (1907-1998), titled Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art, has been released by Peter Lang this month. The volume, edited by Pierpaolo Antonello, Matilde...
Collaborative Artistic Theory and Practice. ‘Le ragioni dei gruppi’. Collective Writing in Futurism
Co-authorship in fiction is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that entails different types of collaboration. In my opinion, it can be seen as a planned and deliberate collaboration between two (or more)...
Dealing with Difficult Heritage: Interdisciplinarity and the Afterlife of Fascist Architecture in Italy
The definition of difficult heritage I use here is indebted to Sharon Macdonald’s important study of the heritage of Nazi Germany, according to which difficult heritage is ‘a past that is recognised...
Interdisciplinary Futurism at Tate Modern
Monday 13 February, 12-2 pm, a Tate Modern Workshop at Tate Exchange Join us in London, at Tate Modern, on Monday 13 February for an interactive workshop on Italian Futurism. The event...
(Re)constructing Futurist Rome
A work by Mario Schifano shown at the recent exhibition Roma Pop City 60-67 at Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO) is a creative remaking of a famous photograph portraying five members...
Interartistic Exchange in Luigi Russolo’s La Musica
If one were to choose an iconic piece of Futurist painting that best encapsulates the potentialities of interartistic exchange, Luigi Russolo’s La musica would be hard to beat. The painting is part...