A Master of Wine abroad

A brief view of Futurism and the Museum of Modern Art in Rovereto

by Patricia Stefanowicz MW

We (members of the Academy of Wine Experts) were treated to a short morning at the MART (Museum of Modern Art) in Rovereto.

The museum and its partner museum in Trento were facilitated by legacies from Fortunato Depero, a native of Rovereto, himself an artist and Italian Futurist.

The museum, brilliant on a warm, sunny day, was restored and enlarged under the direction of renowned Italian architect Renato Rizzi and the Rovereto local Council. The building is quite impressive with a beautifully constructed steel-and-glass dome over the main courtyard and impeccably-set Carrara travertine stone on the external walls. The interior was sleek, modern Italian design: light oak, stainless steel and glass. Easy to negotiate, too, because the main staircase dominates the atrium, allowing a visitor to orientate himself.

Futurism

Futurism was an avant-garde artistic movement precipitated by Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on 20^th February 1909 when he, a writer and artist, published his ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ in the Paris daily, Le Figaro. As was the case with many of his artistic generation, his group included other writers, musicians and artists: fellow Italians Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini, for example.

The Futurism idea was to celebrate the ‘machine age’ of technology and industry, whilst following on from the earlier work of Neo-Impressionists and Cubists, such as Cezanne, Braque and Picasso. The movement inspired Constructivism in Russia (Popova and Rodchenko) and the works of numerous artists in other countries, including Joseph Stella in the USA and George Grosz in Germany. Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings were influenced by the Futurists when his early pictorial works evolved to the ‘abstract’ paintings for which he is best known. Paul Klee, the German-Swiss, and Kandinsky both alluded to the importance of poetry and music in their paintings and sculptures.

The Exhibition

The current exhibition, Futurismo 100, celebrates the centenary of the publication of Manetti’s manifesto. The curator, Ester Coen, completed a magnificent project by setting Futurism in context, then showing developments that reacted to the movement.

The works selected were an excellent representation of the first proponents and their successors. There were words and works by the instigators: Marinetti and his friend Depero. Particular highlights amoung the paintings included three of Kandinsky’s Improvisations, mid-period works by Marc Chagall, Kasimir Malevich (before his ‘White-on-White’ and ‘Black-on-Black’ periods) and the rest of Russian group: Popova, Rodchenko, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and the Russian-born Polish painter, Pawel Filonow.

Sculptures in the exhibition, too, were a revelation. There were a few examples of wood or metal, mainly filigree-like. A rather interesting example of a twisted bicycle was perhaps an inspiration for Marcel Duchamp, the Dada-Surrealist working in the 1920s and beyond.

The rest of the collections

A very quick visit around the rest of the museum demonstrated how serious MART is about Modern Art. The Post-1945 Art and Design exposition showed some of the tensions between the West (Europe and the States) and the ‘Soviet bloc.’ On view was a plethora of propaganda from both sides of the world, including Robert Rauschenberg paintings, snippets of Stanley Kubrick films and the posters of Russian Peter Ghyczy.

The permanent collection exudes Depero’s Futurist vision. There is his re-created art studio and examples of furniture, textiles and industrial art products of the exponents. An early version of Vespa’s popular scooter made me giggle.

In this brief tour of a really rather delectable museum, it’s fairly easy to remind oneself of the continuity in artistic expression and how much fine art is both inspired by, and modified by, its predecessors and the other arts: writing, music, cinema and theatre. For art aficionados, the Rovereto Museum of Modern Art is definitely worth a detour.

Subsequently at the de Chirico retrospective, Musee de l’Art Moderne in Paris, I noticed that three of the de Chirico’s on show are in MART Rovereto’s permanent collection. Linkages.

© Patricia Stefanowicz 2009