The Great War in the drawings of Lorenzo Viani and in the photos of Guido Zeppini. The exhibition in Viareggio

There will still be time until the 12th of April to visit the double exhibition hosted in the recently restored Liberty Villa Argentina (in the sea town of Viareggio, Italy), with the works of the painter Lorenzo Viani and the photos of Guido Zeppini. Two artists mean a double opportunity to get closer to the Great War through different "media" in the same location. On one side you have Lorenzo Viani, considered an important representative of the Italian expressionism and on the other you can meet the interesting photographies of the Captain and doctor Guido Zeppini. This is just a reminder of the extension of this successful exhibition that was supposed to end last Sunday, the 1st of March, and a link to a meaningful gallery with some pictures of the works here temporary lodged.

INFO:
"La Grande Guerra di Lorenzo Viani. Viareggio-Parigi-Il Carso. 

Pittura e fotografia della Grande Guerra in Lorenzo Viani e Guido Zeppini"

From 06 December to 12 April 2015
Viareggio (Lucca, Italy) - Villa Argentina
Curator: Enrico Dei
Free entrance - Opening time: 10 - 13; 15:30 - 18:30
+39 0583 417486-87

n.davini@clipcomunicare.it

http://www.provincia.lucca.it/

The First World War in the drawings of the Italian painter Giuseppe Cominetti

If you chance to travel in the Venice area and in the province of Padua in particular (in this case the village is Piazzola sul Brenta, one of the many nice places along that riverside filled with an unbelievable heritage of Venetian Villas) you may take into consideration a stop at Villa Contarini for the recently opened exhibition dedicated to the war drawings of Giuseppe Cominetti. The inauguration was on the 21st of February and there will be time up to the 2nd of June (public holiday in Italy) to visit this event. Giuseppe Cominetti (1882 - 1930) was a divisionist artist and later protagonist of a short and shy participation to Futurism, the movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The link was possible also thanks to Cominetti's long stay in Paris, where Marinetti ended to establish his "headquarter" and loud megaphone. The war's outset, far from being a total stalemate for Cominetti's art, turned into an unexpected possibility to investigate new paths of his sign. The Villa Contarini exhibition follows 85 years later the one in Teatro Quirino in Rome, projected in full development of the Fascism in Italy and close to the artist's death. Today we are probably free of that kind of bombast used to describe his work; his drawings taken first in the Ardennes then in the Monte Grappa where he volunteered can be approached with a different state of mind, as a powerful new testimony of warfare, different from the one we get with photography or videos. The layout of the exhibition gathers 80 works obtained with pencil and oil based chalk on pounce paper.

INFO:
"Istanti dal fronte. La Prima guerra mondiale nei disegni di Giuseppe Cominetti"
Curator: Beatrice Buscaroli Fabbri
Villa Contarini - Piazzola sul Brenta (PD) - Italy
From Feb. 21 to June 2 2015
Opening time: 10-18 (closed on Wednesday)
Free entrance
www.villacontarini.eu - villacontarini@regione.veneto.it - T. +39.049.8778272 - 73

The Italian painter Mario Sironi and the Great War. An exhibition in Chieti

Mario Sironi (1885 - 1961)

Born in Sassari and grown up in Rome, Mario Sironi is one of the most important artists of the Italian Futurist movement that he joined already in 1914 when he moved to Milan. Before being drawn towards Mussolini’s political movement in the 20s, Sironi took part at the World War I. He enlisted in fact along with several futurists – among other Filippo Tommaso Marinetti or Anselmo Bucci - in the Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Drivers, moved then to the Corps of Photoelectrical Engineers. In 1917 he became finally officer and was sent on the eastern front, on the Piave river line. Here, he continued his artistic activity mainly as illustrator for the fortnightly trench newspaper  “Il Montello”.

These – in part less – renowned works of Sironi are at the centre of a new exhibition in Chieti at the historical Palazzo de’ Mayo, which will start on 22nd February and can be visited till end of May 2014. Supported by S.E.T and Fondazione Chieti, the curator Elena Pontiggia gathers more than 50 works of artists such as Balla, Carrà, Léger, Grosz and Dix and tries so to shed light on the dramatic experience of the WWI, on the one hand, and to depict the Italian and European artistic spirit that influenced the key figure of the exhibition, Sironi. For the first time the graphic and pictorial output of the Italian Futurist artist during the time-span 1915-1918 will be analyzed in details, without neglecting some of his most important works of the 1920s.

Further information (only in Italian) here, just click on the link related to the exhibition and download the material:  

(Here some interesting examples of Mario Sironi 's work as illustrator of the trench newspaper "Il Montello".)

Transformations: an exhibition on World War I in Calgary

You still have few weeks to visit an interesting exhibition in Calgary, to which we’d like today to draw your attention. A trenchant title – Transformations – and a fascinating theme – the representation of the First World War in the visual art – characterizes this exhibition produced by the Canadian War Museum in cooperation with the National Gallery of Canada, running from September 2013 till January 12th 2014 at the Glenbow Museum. It collects war-influenced paintings, including works by the renowned Canadian painter A. Y. Jackson (1882-1974, see his Vimy Ridge from Souchez Valley, 1917,  in the picture above) and the great German Expressionist Otto Dix (1891-1969).

Especially the landscape paintings of both authors reveal the strong impact of the Great War on their artistic output - maybe a way to elaborate the tremendous experience of the conflict. A. Y. Jackson enlisted in the Canadian Army’s 60th battalion, arrived in Le Havre, France, on February 1916, and was sent with his unit during the spring of the same year to the region of Sanctuary of Wood, just outside Ypres. In June he was wounded during a heavy barrage by German artillery in the Battle of Mount Sorrel. After his recovery he was transferred at Shoreham, England, where in the summer 1917 he met Lord Beaverbrook, a member of the Canadian War Memorials Fund, who engaged him as official painter: he spent therefore the following months, till 1918, between the Flandres and the battlefields and his London studio. On the other side of the front line, also Otto Dix took actively part to the Great War. He enrolled as a volunteer in the German Army and was sent to the Western front where he fought during the Battle of the Somme. In November 1917 he then moved with his unit to the frontline with Russia and at the beginning of 1918 once again in the Flandres.

Two men, fighting on the opposite sides of  the battlefield, expressed in their following artistic effort the traumatic experiences of the Great War and translated in images – especially of landscape, on which the exhibition focuses – how the ideas about the birth, death and rebirth of nations ruled in a sometimes unconscious way human history during those years and dramatically few decades later during the WWII.

An introduction to the exhibition and further information here.

The art coming from the trenches: the drypoint of Anselmo Bucci in the exhibition of Montelabbate

The recognizable trait of drypoint
in this work of Anselmo Bucci

The title of this exhibition in Montelabbate (Italy) dedicated to the artist Anselmo Bucci lands us in the middle of that important chapter to dedicate to visual artists and their experience of the Great War: "L’arte in trincea. Anselmo Bucci e la Prima Guerra Mondiale" is a very short exhibition starting on the 2nd of June. The show gather fifty drypoint etching artworks from the folder Croquis du front italien (Paris, 1917) where we find the results of his war experience at the front as volunteer cyclist. In spite of his affinity to futurist artists such as Marinetti, Boccioni and Sant’Elia, in the etching works here displayed we discover Bucci's eye more absorbed by the rest moments of the battalion. One of the reasons of interest of this exhibition is also the background and overall frame where the artworks lay, full of cross-references to the main Italian writers operating during the First World War years. By the way, Anselmo Bucci was a writer himself. In 1930 he published Il pittore volante ("The Flying Painter") awarded with the prestigious Viareggio literary prize and some aphorisms of this lucky book gained popularity in Italy.

L’arte in trincea. Anselmo Bucci e la Prima Guerra Mondiale
(Art in the trenches. Anselmo Bucci and the First World War)
Palazzo Municipale di Montelabbate (PU / Italy)
2-16 June, 2013
Saturdays and Sundays from 5pm to 7pm
Info: +39.349.8605868 or email
Free entrance

1914: War and the Avant-Gardes. An International Conference (CfP)

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

We'd like today to draw the attention to the Call for Papers reported below. The interdisciplinary conference which has to be organized next December 2013, aims to discuss how visual arts reacted to and suffered from the Word War I, focusing on the single year 1914. This could offer a chance to reconsider this very special field of human production and innovation, both from an intellectual-spritual and a material-economical point of view, and to appreciate so the role played by the avant-gardes of the early century. 


International Conference
1914: War and the Avant-Gardes
Call for Papers 


With its origins in military vocabulary, the metaphor of the « avant-garde » ran through the art world with particular intensity at the beginning of 1914. In both Europe and the United States, contemporary arts tackled modes of conflict and rupture, the leveling of the recent past and the authoritarian conquest of a utopian future. This militant train of thoughtcan be traced in the fine arts, as well as in other forms of visual expression, from photography and cinema to decorative arts, the arts of industry and other image technologies. These practices were as concerned with theoretical and critical discourse as they were with material production. In this context, the phenomenon of internal fragmentation – of groups, trends, inspirations – existed alongside an aim for universalism, driven by the dream of abolishing the boundaries between the arts and, more radically, between different world views. The quest for crossover and interaction between the languages of philosophy, music, dance, visual arts and literature led to the desire to interweave time and place, cultural and religious traditions, and to abolish the hierarchies between different forms of expression. Around the notions of “primitive”, “popular”, “infantile”, as well as “technological”, “rational” and “scientific”, a common psychological and anthropological horizon seemed within reach, to put an end to the fractures between nations, as well as individuals. Yet rivalries continued: national consciousness continued to sharpen in the field of the “avant-garde”, to ensure the mastery of the future. Kandinsky, a Russian living in Germany and exhibiting in France, made abstraction into the intuitive grammar of the language of “humanity”; but, in homage to Matisse or Delaunay, he also denounced the “sensuality” of the French tradition. 

In August 1914, real and immediate violence seized individual destinies and brutally reoriented them: foreigner and enemy, Kandinsky was forced to flee Germany to evade internment; his German friends of theBlauer Reiter-groupjoined the frontline, where August Macke was killed only a few weeks later. In Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire, who was preparing to give a conference in Berlin in January 1915, became the spokesman for a virulent patriotism and immediately signed up to fight. The young Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who had been living in London since 1910, moved from anti-militarism to a poetry of modernist violence in the circle of Ezra Pound, before dying in the trenches in 1915. Those such as Romain Rolland, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Maurice Loutreuil or, more briefly, André Masson who chose exile in neutral Switzerland or Italy to maintain their pacifist discourse were rare. 

This interdisciplinary conference aims to interrogate the complex relations between the visual arts, in their largest sense, and history, at a moment where the European crisis of conscience crystallized into catastrophe. Restricting itself to strict temporal parameters – between 1st January and 31st December 1914 –it will explore the intellectual and practical circumstances of visual creation during the first six “ordinary” monthsof the year, whilst also seeking to understand as precisely as the possible the nature of the realizations provoked by the start of the war as well as by its first engagements. Works and objects, the orientation of taste and of the market, critical and theoretical discourse will be exploredin order to dissect that which was shattered in western representation between January and December 1914. 

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This conferenceisorganizedjointly by the "Centre allemand d'histoire de l'art"/Deutsches Forum fürKunstgeschichte, l’université de Paris Ouest – Nanterre – La Défense and l’Institut universitaire de France. It will take place in Paris on 5th and 6th December 2013, at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art and the Deutsches Forum fürKunstgeschichte. Oral presentations, of twenty-five minutes in length, will be in French and English. They will address visual culture in Europe in its largest sense, within the strict parameters of the year 1914. 

A provisional title and proposal in French or English, of no more than 300 words, should be sent, in one document along with a brief C.V., to Marine Branland colloque.arts1914@hotmail.fr, before 15 February 2013.  

Organized by : 
Annette Becker (Institut universitaire de France, université de Paris Ouest – Nanterre – La Défense)
Andreas Beyer (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Paris)
Itzhak Goldberg (université Jean Monnet – Saint-Etienne)
Godehard Janzing (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Paris)
Rémi Labrusse (université de Paris Ouest – Nanterre – La Défense)

“La bellezza e l’orrore”. The artists and the Great War in Florence

The Italian painter
Ottone Rosai in 1918

Here is a quick recommendation regarding a short exhibition curated by Soprintendenza Archivistica per la Toscana, that opened at Società delle Belle Arti-Circolo degli Artisti “Casa di Dante” (address: Via Santa Margherita, 2, Florence) on September 29th and will end on October 25th, 2012. 

People know Italy entered the World War in May, 1915, after a long, painful and sometimes still obscure debate around interventionism. An interesting and partially decisive contribution to this debate came from artists. The views of the war among worldwide appreciated men of art like Ottone Rosai, Giovanni Mestica, Anselmo Bucci or the pacifist efforts of a novelist and poet like Aldo Palazzeschi are the starting point of the present exhibition that is helding in the city of art par excellence: Florence. 

Here is the website of board of administration of cultural heritage in Tuscany, just in case you are travelling in Florence in the above mentioned period or if you need to get further information about the documents and the catalogue of the exhibition.

“1917”: Upcoming Conference in Centre Pompidou-Metz

Otto Dix, Trenches, 1917

Few months ago we talked about the unmissable exhibition "1917", that took place at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. We now come back to it with a short post, since a two-day conference organized by the Centre Pompidou-Metz in collaboration with the German Center of Art History is planned as the concluding meeting of the exhibition.
20th and 21st September, some leading experts on Great War and on the related artistic production will gather in Centre Pompidou-Metz to discuss and analyze some of the key topics of the exhibition. Beside a starting panel concerning some psychological and cultural attitudes in experiencing and depicting the WWI in France and Germany, on Thursday afternoon the works will converge on the figurative arts as avant-gardiste experimentation (above all, Dadaism and Expressionism) in their succeeding changing phases and in connection with the broader cultural – i.e. philosophical, theoretical, even political – discussion during the war years. Figurative art will be at the center of the opening communication, concerning Picasso's Parade, even on Friday morning panel, that will continue widening the discussion towards other arts, such as dance, poetry and cinematography. The closing panel will deal lastly with the contemporary artistic reception and re-elaboration of the legacy and memory of WWI, and especially of the year 1917, as turning point of the conflict.

Further practical information and the full program here.