Name: Press Release
Start: 2022-01-12
End: 2022-02-25
Location: David Zwirner

“In both Italy and America, the arts function as a national redemption, offering themselves as a simulacrum of life, capable of triggering a discussion about the discontents of a society devoted to rampant technology and marketing. Thus, the heartening and seductive form of art operates to challenge reality and nurture the mirage of a future ‘civilization’ with a reassuring character.… It was between 1945 and 1964 that Italian art turned to American art in regard to its investigators, collectors, and dealers. And similarly, American artists refocused on a culture whose roots and history could not be wiped out by the Fascist era.”

—Germano Celant, curator, Roma-New York: 1948–1964, at the Murray and Isabella Rayburn Foundation, New York, 1993—the inspiration for this exhibition

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Members of the “Crack” artist group, Piazza del Popolo, Rome, 1960 (detail); from left to right: Giulio Turcato, Achille Perilli, Gastone Novelli, Fabio Mauri, Mimmo Rotella, Piero Dorazio, and Gino Marotta. Photo by Virginia Dortch. © 2023 The Estate of Virginia Dortch Dorazio / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Virginia Dortch is the author of two books, Balla: An Album of his Life and Work and Peggy Guggenheim and her Friends. She studied Art History and Fine Arts at Columbia University and received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina. After 1953, she spent two decades living between Europe and New York, becoming acquainted with many figures in the European and American art worlds whom she often photographed.

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Members of the “Crack” artist group at Caffè Rosati in Piazza del Popolo, Rome, 1960 (detail); from left to right: Mimmo Rotella, Achille Perilli, Fabio Mauri, Gino Marotta, Piero Dorazio, Giulio Turcato, and Gastone Novelli; photographed by Dortch while on assignment for the magazine Metro and published in Metro no. 1, 1960. © 2023 The Estate of Virginia Dortch Dorazio / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In the years following the Second World War, with the return of notable artists, writers, and intellectuals from exile and POW camps, Rome emerged as the center of a new Italian avant-garde—one less beholden to the Parisian art scene that had largely defined modernist activity during the first half of the twentieth century.

This page highlights selected works from the exhibition, which focuses in particular on the Italian artists active in this period.

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Piero Dorazio (left) with New York-based art dealers Sidney Janis (center) and Leo Castelli (right) at Caffè Paradiso in Venice during the 30th Venice Biennale, 1960 (detail). Photo by Virginia Dortch. © 2023 The Estate of Virginia Dortch Dorazio / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Alberto Burri (third from left) on a bragozzo going to the Island of Torcello near Venice during the 30th Venice Biennale, 1960 (detail); also pictured: Nino Franchina (left of Burri), Basilio Franchina (right of Burri wearing glasses), Afro (behind Franchina), Burri’s wife, Minsa Craig (right of Afro), and Gian Tommaso Liverani, owner of Galleria La Salita, Rome (with his shirt unbuttoned). Photo by Virginia Dortch. © 2023 The Estate of Virginia Dortch Dorazio / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Philip Guston with the hand of the Colossus of Constantine in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, 1960 (detail). Photo by Virginia Dortch. © 2023 The Estate of Virginia Dortch Dorazio / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Today, the amenities of Piazza del Popolo include, besides the parking lots within the hemicycles, the writers’ and artists’ café hard by Via Ripetta; and a second café off Via Babuino, where movie and television people gather.”

—Milton Gendel, photographer and critic, 1963

Milton Gendel, Piazza del Popolo, 1954 (detail)

“I remember my first trips to Rome. Cultural exchanges and discussions took place around Piazza del Popolo, where cafe Rosati had a central role as a meeting point of art world protagonists’”

—Germano Celant, 1993

Installation view, Roma/New York, 1953–1964, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented Twentieth Century Italian Art —a major survey that included work by younger artists active at the time, such as Afro. “The museum is looking forward with special interest to reviewing the work of these new artists who,” the press release stated, “during and since the war, have aroused so much interest in this country.”

Installation view, Twentieth Century Italian Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1949

Against the backdrop of New York’s emergence as an international art capital and Italy’s postwar economic boom and cultural revival after fascism, Informale and abstract painters working and exhibiting in Rome began to be regularly featured in solo exhibitions in New York galleries—like Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery, and Catherine Viviano’s and Leo Castelli’s eponymous spaces. At the same time, several New York-based artists traveled to Italy and exhibited at notable venues in Rome, most especially Irene Brin’s and Gaspero del Corso’s Galleria dell’Obelisco and Plinio De Martiis’s Galleria La Tartaruga.

Galleria dell’Obelisco (left); Exhibition leaflet for Joie de vivre, L’Obelisco, Rome, 1954, showing exhibitions organized abroad by L’Obelisco in 1952–1954 (right)

A central protagonist of postwar abstraction, Alberto Burri (1915–1995) is celebrated for his innovative and pioneering use of unconventional media and processes to expand notions of painting. Informed by his experience as a prisoner of war in Texas in the 1940s and his later connection to America as a teacher in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, Burri created a materials-based art that engaged and transformed humble, everyday substances. A profoundly significant antecedent to the arte povera movement, his work also influenced that of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, who famously visited Burri’s studio in Rome in 1953 with Cy Twombly.

Alberto Burri

Sacco e oro, 1953

Oil, burlap, and gold leaf on burlap

34 x 39 3/4 inches (86.4 x 101 cm)
Framed: 34 3/4 x 40 1/2 inches (88.3 x 102.9 cm)

Roma/New York, 1953–1964

Alberto Burri

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly

Toti Scialoja

Carla Accardi

Carla Accardi

Carla Accardi

Jannis Kounellis

Franz Kline

Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca-Relli

Afro

Willem de Kooning

Piero Dorazio

Piero Dorazio

Mario Schifano

Mario Schifano

Mario Schifano

Franco Angeli

Giosetta Fioroni

Giosetta Fioroni

Tano Festa