BOOM 60!
Era arte moderna
The Museo del Novecento and Electa Publishers present “BOOM 60! Era arte moderna” (BOOM 60 - Modern Art Era), curated by Mariella Milan and Desdemona Ventroni, in collaboration with Maria Grazia Messina and Antonello Negri. The exhibition is promoted by the Culture Councillorship of the City of Milan and devoted to Italian art between the early 1950’s and the early 1960’s, with a special focus on its coverage in the most popular communication media of the time, notably magazines and newspapers.
These were the years of the Italian economic boom, when ‘illustrated news magazines’, such as Epoca, Le Ore, and L'Europeo just to cite a few, reached their peak circulation and faithfully mirrored people’s aspirations and common way of thinking.
The themes of art – whether it was a criticism of abstract art or new materials, or the praise of portrait, or photos of successful artists – were intertwined with the coverage of celebrities from the world of cinema, television, music. Not by chance, art collectors were popping up on the scene as protagonists and, on the wake of the ‘Italian economic miracle’, art seemed to be destined to access everyone’s home, just like a refrigerator or a washing machine.
In the setup devised by Atelier Mendini, approximately one hundred and fifty works including paintings, sculptures and graphic artworks, will dialogue with pages from magazines and television and cinematographic footage, where artists are transformed into real stars: from immortal Picasso to Bernard Buffet, "the painter in a Rolls Royce"; at the time protagonist of the chronicles of art and gossip. A rich documentary section will feature the various magazines and their way of illustrating art, from cover pages to interviews, from critics columns to advertisements, from photojournalism to satire.
Photo: cover of "L'Illustrazione Italiana" year 85, n. 7, July 1958. Photo by Ugo Mulas.
Mariella Milan and Desdemona Ventroni
in collaboration with Maria Grazia Messina and Antonello Negri
