ITA ENG

METROPOLIS

GAM di Torino presents (from 04-02-2006 to 04-06-2006) Metropolis a great international exhibition on the vision and interpretation of the city in the art of the first Avant-gardes, from 1910 to 1925.

The subject of the city, as interpreted in works by Pablo Picasso, Umberto Boccioni, Fernand Léger, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Paul Klee, Georg Grosz, Robert Delaunay, Max Weber, Mario Sironi, Albert Gleizes, August Macke, Ludwig Kirchner, Lyonel Feininger, Joseph Stella, John Marin, and Alexandra Exter, amongst others, is viewed in five sections which examine the various themes taken up by the Avant-garde movements in relation to city life in the early twentieth century. The vision of the Avant-gardes was modified by a perceptive experience which was as accelerated as it was fragmentary and manifold. Technological progress (the speed of transport with trams, cars and underground railways, the introduction of electric lighting, and the simultaneity of radio communications) gave rise to new artistic visions, ranging from the spatial dislocations of the Cubists to the simultaneity of dynamic interpenetration in the Futurists and the tensions and distortions of the Expressionists.

About 130 works (including photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Eugène Atget, and films by the Lumière brothers) will be on show. They come from prestigious public and private collections in Italy and abroad (including the Centre George Pompidou and the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, the Städelsche Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Russian State Museum in St Petersburg, the Whitney Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Washington and the National Museum of Art in Osaka). The exhibition thus offers a wide-ranging view of the urban context, with thematic interpretations including the division between indoor and outdoor, the streets filled with crowds, the symbolic nodes of the metropolis such as bridges, factories, amusement areas and, lastly, imaginary and futuristic projections.

Sections of the exhibition:

The Futurist perception of urban space: views of the street, the city at night, crowds and suburbs. Futurist painters took a series of subjects illustrating urban modernity from Marinetti’s Manifesto of 1909 and indeed the exhibition includes paintings like Boccioni’s Simultaneous Visions from the Museum of Wuppertal and his Forces of a Street, which is less well-known in Italy, from Osaka. In nocturnal views the city is ablaze with electric lights, as in Alexandra Exter’s City at Night), and it offers such spectacles as the Luna Park by the American Joseph Stella. The subject of the outer city, which became so desolate after the First World War, is told by artists such as Christopher Nevinson and Mario Sironi.

Nodes: walls, ports, bridges, factories The profile of the industrial city is characterised by the presence of factory chimneys, the arches of viaducts and metal bridges, and by cranes in river and sea ports. These symbols with their powerful sense of the contemporary attracted the attention of painters in Germany (Kirchner, Beckmann,) Russia (Goncharova, ·evchenko, Lapsin), Sweden (Hjertèn) and France (Delmarle, Chabaud), but they also influenced the visions of the American Simpson Stevens, of the Pole Chwistek and of Ivan Puni. The contribution of the Cubist language is well documented by the extraordinary Landscape with Posters of 1912 in which Picasso took inspiration from the walls of Paris plastered with advertisements.

The Laboratory City Paris and New York, two great cities on opposite sides of the Atlantic, became model metropolises, the object of study by artists and the favourite places in their imaginary worlds. In an accelerated or dilated manner, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger captured the historic spaces of the city in Paris, from the Latin Quarter to the Quais on the Seine, while the prodigious towering of the Manhattan skyscrapers in New York or the dynamic power of the Brooklyn Bridge in the works of Max Weber, Joseph Stella and John Marin became a direct metaphor for a striving for the future in the utopia of progress.

The Kaleidoscope City With the rapid spread of engine-powered traffic, electric lighting, and advertising signs and hoardings, urban areas offered constantly changing views, introducing new ways of seeing and representing. In the works of artists such as Albert Gleizes, Christian Schad, Léopold Survage and Lionel Feininger, Cubist fragmentation of figures and spaces turned into prismatic compositions, while in those of Henri Valensi or Aristarkh Lentulov urban horizons were modulated like musical scores.

The Paper City The main experience was that of German artists who, having gone through the brutality of the war, went back to a defeated Berlin ­ a place of violent social conflict. The metropolis proved to be a place of social uprooting and abuse. Flanking great expressionist literature, artists like Georg Grosz, Ludwig Meidner, and Otto Dix decided to narrate the city, using the crudeness of graphics to portray the distress and hellishness of urban life. On another front, Paul Klee also entrusted his own vision of the city to paper, with lines that bunched up or spread out, like growing organism or, on the contrary, a place of emptiness and solitude.

Young architects, from the Futurists in Italy (such as Antonio Sant’Elia and Virgilio Marchi) to the Novembergruppe in post-war Germany, responded by imagining futuristic spaces and buildings. They adopted this utopian dimension in order to overcome the contradictions inherent in their vision of the modern city. Sheets of drawings accompany visionary watercolours in a desire to become the creators of a second nature, in which man becomes a demiurge and no longer the victim of his own history.

The catalogue, published by GAM, contains essays by Maria Grazia Messina, Maria Mimita Lamberti, Thomas Gaehtgens, Maria Luisa Pacelli, and Tulliola Sparagni.

Turin, GAM Via Magenta, 31

Opening: every day 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Thursdays 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Curated by Maria Grazia Messina and Maria Mimita Lamberti

www.gamtorino.it