Ponti

Venice – Bold, eccentric, with a flair with few equals, Peggy Guggenheim he discovered and valued extraordinary talents, effectively changing the destinies of twentieth century art. As a great collector and patron that he was, he never hesitated to go against the tide. As when, after settling in Venice, she became interested in the works of the Futurists, regardless of the hostile climate that at the time surrounded the only true Italian avant-garde, accused of being close to the fascist regime. During the making of the documentary FORMIDABLE BOCCIONI from Eleonora Zamparutti And Piero Muscaràproduced by ARTE.it Originals in collaboration with ITsART And Rai Culturanow available on ITsART, we had the opportunity to talk about it with Karole PB Vail, grandson of Peggy and for five years director of the Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

It is always fascinating to hear a story from those who have lived it closely, albeit indirectly. Therefore we propose here the full interview with Karole PB Vail, a precious point of view on an unforgettable page of art and collecting. The story of an encounter between giants – Peggy and Boccioni – united by a common talent: knowing how to break the rules and imagine the future, anticipating ideas and phenomena that were then unthinkable.

Karole Vail in FORMIDABLE BOCCIONI, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection | © ARTE.it

“Peggy Guggenheim began to devote herself seriously to collecting in the late 1930s, after having been introduced to the avant-garde circles of Paris in the previous decade”, says Vail: “In 1938 she opened her first gallery in London and then, as is well known, , began acquiring one painting a day with the aim of building a collection of modern art. This is why today at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni we find an extraordinary collection dedicated to the European avant-gardes, as well as to the American abstract expressionists. Here in Venice we have the wonderful opportunity to be able to compare ourselves with the art of the early twentieth century and to understand how those artists were changing the way we look at art and interpret it. The most important and innovative movements of that season – Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism – are represented at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, as well as many examples of sculpture that are radically detached from the tradition of the nineteenth century. Understanding them means being able to better appreciate contemporary art as well ”.

The meeting – which for chronological reasons could only be virtual – between Peggy Guggenheim and Umberto Boccioni passes precisely through a sculpture, today among the masterpieces of the Venetian museum: Dynamism of a running horse + case of 1915.
“Peggy Guggenheim was always very interested in sculpture. When she settled in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni – after exhibiting her collection at the 1948 Biennale – she continued to purchase new works. In 1958 you made an important acquisition, perhaps the last in the field of sculpture: a wonderful unique and extraordinary work by the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni, ‘Dynamism of a running horse + case’. Boccioni had built it in 1915, just one year before the terrible horse accident that cost him his life. Perhaps this sculpture was never finished, we will never know … It is exceptional because it is one of the very few sculptures of its kind, made with a mix of materials such as cardboard, painted metal and wood … “.

“In 1912”recalls Vail, “Boccioni had written a Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture. He was deeply convinced that sculpture should have open forms, without borders. He was trying to break with the great tradition of Italian sculpture, and he was succeeding: his look forward was futurist in the most authentic way. ‘Dynamism of a running horse + case’ it is probably the latest example of what Boccioni wrote in the Manifesto “.

Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a running horse + houses, Detail | Still from FORMIDABLE BOCCIONI | © ARTE.it

After World War II Peggy Guggenheim is not the only one to collect modern Italian sculpture: many American collectors are taking an interest in it. But unlike the others, the tenant of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni is courageous and free of prejudices, and she manages to look at the works of the futurists for what they are: disruptive avant-garde art. “Driven by an interest in sculpture and a desire to get even closer to Italian art while living in Venice, Peggy Guggenheim made a truly remarkable decision by purchasing this Boccioni piece”notes Vail: “For many it would have been quite difficult to acquire a work by a futurist artist who was not in fashion due to his links with fascism. Peggy Guggenheim was breaking the rules once again, just as Boccioni had broken the rules of art in her time “.

64 years after Peggy’s choice, critics, audiences and collectors have embraced her ideas. Thanks to her, Boccioni and the Futurists are at home in the Lagoon, and Dynamism of a running horse + case shines like a jewel within the extraordinary Guggenheim Collection. “In my opinion Boccioni was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century”Vail concludes: “I think he understood that it was possible to go beyond painting and probably even beyond sculpture. I think he was able to look very far “.

Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a running horse + houses, 1915, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection
 

Read also:
• Art in motion. At the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, GEN Z meets photographer Matteo Marchi to talk about Boccioni
• Ester Coen tells Boccioni, the painter who challenged the Cubists with shots of light and dynamism
• The Mattioli Collection at the Museo del Novecento: the story of the protagonists
• Gino Agnese tells Boccioni, the talent rejected in drawing who won the challenge of the twentieth century
• Boccioni and Vittoria, the futurist and the princess. Chronicle of a love outside the box
• That time when the futurists, unknown and misunderstood, exhibited at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune (selling only one painting)
• Traveling with Boccioni. The masterpieces to be admired in the world
• Boccioni’s masterpieces to see in Italy
• “FORMIDABLE BOCCIONI”: the futurist genius in an unpublished docufilm

Brescia – Professional artist, even before being a dissident, Victoria Lomasko knows that her first exhibition in Italy, hosted in Brescia, will change her destiny.
She arrived in Italy last March after a daring departure from her Russia – a country in which she tried to stay until the very end to carry out her role as a witness – until now Victoria has had to fight to obtain documents “spending a lot of time – as she herself says – to prove she is a dissident artist ”. And now that her latest work was completed last night right inside the Museum of Santa Giulia – space that until January 8 will host his personal exhibition entitled The Last Soviet Artist curated by Elettra Stamboulis – the one who is considered by critics as the most important Russian graphic social artist can truly be said to be happy.

Russian Artists in The USA (Dartmouth College Sketches), 2019 Watercolor, acrylic, pen and ink on paper 415 x 300 mm, each Courtesy Edel Assanti, London

“In Brescia they recreated the atelier of my dreams” confesses Lomasko during the press conference for the inauguration of the exhibition itinerary wanted by the Municipality of Brescia and the Brescia Museums Foundation. “I like to think of Italy as a beauty spreadable sandwich, but so big you can’t bite it. I am struck by the way people relate to art ”.
Presented as part of the Brescia Peace Festival, the exhibition, which can be visited free of charge for the entire duration of the initiative, marks the third act of the research curated by Elettra Stamboulis, undertaken by the Brescia Museums Foundation in 2019, which began with the Zehra exhibition. Doğan We will also have better days. Works from Turkish prisonsand continued in 2021 with the staff of Badiucao China is not close. Works by a dissident artist.
“This third episode of the Brescia Musei Foundation project – underlines Francesca Bazoli, president of the Brescia Musei Foundation – shows how contemporary art is an effective tool for addressing the issue of the protection of universal human rights. We weren’t looking for dissidents, but for artists who could express this kind of message. Fifty years ago Brescia hosted the first Russian dissidents Mal’cev and Sinjavskij and still today welcomes and supports those who speak out for the rights of all of us ”.

Victoria Lomasko | The Last Soviet Artist, Installation | Photo: © Alberto Mancini | Courtesy Brescia Museums Foundation

The exhibition itinerary, designed specifically for the spaces in Brescia, features a vast production of the Russian artist who uses drawing as a means of reporting and resistance. Lomasko created site-specific works during his residency in the city: five monumental panels designed and created ad hoc in the ateliers of the Santa Giulia museum complex, in the two months that saw the artist staying in residence at the Brescia Museums Foundation. And today the surprise announcement: “the five works will remain inside the museum, because they were created for you” promises Victoria, with the hope that, in the case of temporary exhibitions held in international museums, they can be generously lent by Brescia and then return to the city.

Lomasko’s artistic research is illuminating in helping us to meticulously reconstruct the social and political history of Russia from 2011 to today, from the anti-Putin demonstrations, which the artist has drawn live, to the representations of “deep Russia”, that of the forgotten and the emerged, who have always been his favorite subjects.
On the other hand, as Stefano Karadjov, director of the Brescia Museums Foundation points out, “The choice of the Foundation to show the work that has been mapping the last, the rebels, the marginalized in that immense and complex country that is Russia since 2005, dates back to a before the start of the conflict with Ukraine. Our idea dates back to about two years ago, when a certain one was raging cancel culture in Russian sauce. In those months we had the idea of ​​the exhibition and we immediately received the shield of the city politics that has always protected this project. Last February’s attack made Lomasko’s visual storytelling even more urgent. It is very important to underline how the research of the artists who were the protagonists of this trilogy dedicated to the relationship between contemporary art and rights is not guided by priorities of a geopolitical nature, but aimed at the discovery of new artists, active interpreters of the society of their time “.

Victoria Lomasko | The Last Soviet Artist, Installation | Photo: © Alberto Mancini | Courtesy Brescia Museums Foundation

Thus, as the curator reiterates, The Last Soviet Artist becomes a historical-geographical-social journey with an installation designed to make the visitor travel in a geographical space unknown to him, beyond any simplification, following the atlas of anonymous faces, that of the last who live in the immense suburbs of empire, from Dagestan to Ingushetia, with its population of half a million, and 78 ethnic groups.

The artist’s invitation is to enter the geographies of the faces and thoughts of all those worlds that for many people are only names on the globe: Bishkek, Yerevan, Tblisi, Osh, Minsk.
In Frozen Poetrythe first section of the exhibition in Brescia, Frozen poetry allows you to retrace and visualize the artistic, social and intellectual transformations of the town of Lomasko. We find works that pass through the mediation and resilience of artists such as Lomasko’s father who had to draw for the Soviet regime despite being distant from it, to the point of arriving at the new generation that draws and witnesses the events imagining what will come.

Victoria Lomasko, A Trip to Osh # 3, 2016 Ink, marker and oil pastel on paper 297 x 210 mm | Courtesy Edel Assanti

If to palpitate in the second section, Drawing Diaryis the generational theme with the artist who recalls how dissidence can also be constituted by words spoken in a low voice, an alienating effect typical of the theater explodes in the third section entitled Changing of Seasons. Here a wall gives way to the huge mural created in Brussels immediately after the artist’s forced exile. In this harrowing work that highlights the artist’s ability to create possible worlds, monuments become subjects that work mercilessly, continuing, albeit headless, to throw the sword. People take on dramatic and desperate tones, while voices of dissidence create shadows that make them misshapen. The only act allowed is the gesture of placing the sheet on the body of Bucha’s victims.

The most narrative figure of the entire itinerary is instead set in the fourth chapter of the exhibition, entitled Graphic Reportages, which tells how Russia got to this point. Here the public will have the opportunity to browse the works of the series Juvenile Prison, which testify to the juvenile prison reality of the capital and the chronicle of the Resistance fallen into oblivion. The series also reviews the complex reality of women: street workers and local workers, workers for others and the disillusioned who keep the country on its feet by catalyzing the artist’s feminist gaze.

Victoria Lomasko, Under Water, 2021, Watercolor, acrylic, pen and ink on paper 590 x 415 mm | Courtesy Edel Assanti, London

From the solitude of Moscow – an island suspended in the void as early as 2021, in the long year in which the borders remain closed and the fibrillation in the square resumes during which Lomasko draws the participants live, without filters – the exhibition leads to the last section . Five Steps it is a prayer on the meaning of exile, on loneliness, on isolation, but also on the profound trust in the idea of ​​humanity which unites all and which is able to cross borders. These are five stations created specifically for Brescia that have seen the artist busy for over a month.
“These five works are accompanied by texts – anticipates Stamboulis -. The text is an integral part of Victoria Lomasko’s art. The work can only be seen if you read the accompanying text “.

At the end of the route, absolutely not to be missed The Last Soviet Artista documentary film dedicated to Victoria Lomasko, made by the English director and musician Geraint Rhys, subtitled for the occasion.

Read also:
• The city of the Lion: the Middle Ages in Brescia in a great exhibition
• The word to Badiucao: my art beyond censorship

Bologna – His last stencil complaint dates back to a few days ago, on the wall of a building half-destroyed by bombing in Borodyanka, an urban settlement in the Kiev oblast. A judoka child, who would make one think of Ukraine, knocks out an adult, with a reference to Putin, suspended as honorary president of the international Judo federation.
While Banksy’s javelin also reaches the streets of Ukraine, the voice of the faceless street artist joins the chorus of counter-current colleagues who meet in Bologna on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to the most provocative, unconventional and revolutionary works of our time.
From 11 November to 7 May the enfants terribles of art, Jago, Banksy and TvBoy, meet at Palazzo Albergati to tell, through 60 masterpieces, some of the most transgressive stories of Italian and international public art, through a dialogue between the mysterious English artist and other influential Italian colleagues of the moment .
Following the thread of provocation, the exhibition Jago, Banksy, TvBoy and other counter-current stories it is presented as a monographic of the most significant works of each protagonist. Like this Girl with Baloon And Bomb Love by Banksy wink at Circulatory system it’s at Self memory of Iago to give in to the series of kisses and that of the heroes of TvBoy.

Banksy, Bomb Love, Lithograph, 50 x 70 cm, 2003, Pop House Gallery

In dialogue with the three are those artists who took inspiration from Jago, Banksy and TvBoy, or who simply fit into the “counter-current” path that characterizes them. There is Obey – on display with the famous manifesto Hopemade in 2008 to support Barack Obama’s presidential campaign – and there’s Ravo with The girl with the Pearl Earring and then Laika with his famous Not this “game” up to Pau with its series of Santa Suerte.

A dialogue divided into four sections invites the public to grasp correspondences, orientations and trends related to art and European street art. We start with Iago, born in 1987, the first artist to send a marble sculpture, The First Baby, on the International Space Station, to continue, in the second section, with Banksy. Terrorism, war crimes, the economic crisis, bullying, abuse at work creep into his figures with disenchanted humor, transforming walls, walls, stairs, anonymous street corners into spaces for reflection.

Andrea Ravo Mattoni, Vermeer, The girl with a pearl earring, Spray on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, 2022, Pop House Gallery

Salvatore Benintende, aka TvBoy, raised in Milan, Sicilian blood, moved to Barcelona for love, is at the center of the third section of the path with his ideal kisses between contemporary icons and a language that delves into the television bombing suffered by his generation and by which TVBOY, playing on this concept right from the name, invites us to unmark ourselves. From the continuous, exaggerated, ravenous production of TVBOY, the exhibition projects us into the fourth section, among the graffiti by Andrea Ravo Mattoni that animate the immortal masterpieces of modern art normally exhibited in museums.

TvBoy, Hope, Mixed technique on canvas, 146 x 144 cm, 2022 Pop Ho use Gallery

The wall, the highest expression of Street Art, with road signs and wooden fences, is at the center of the works by Thierry Guetta, alias Mr Brainwash, while a strong bond with matter characterizes the figures of Pau, poised between sacred and profane. A disenchanted and ironic vision connotes the language of Laika, a synchronously independent, mysterious and free artist, with his ephemeral tableau vivant. The last message is entrusted to Hopehope in fact, the most effective American political illustration since the time of Uncle Sam created by Obey and which made the victory of Barack Obama memorable, the first African American to hold the office of President of the United States of America.
The exhibition is open every day from 10 to 20 (the ticket office closes one hour earlier).