The word realism conjures the everyday, the unfussy, the small. But what’s real when the world has gone mad? It’s a question that gripped Italian photographers, directors, journalists, and writers around World War II and is surely worth asking again. This exhibition heralds artists who captured quotidian life in an era of daily shocks.
"NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932–1960" reviewed in The New York Times by Jillian Steinhauer.
Enrica Viganò, an independent curator, spent nine years searching through the archives of individual photographers to assemble the 174 prints in “NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932-1960.” There are no institutions in Italy that, like the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz., hold the archives of important photographers, so Ms. Viganò sought out her subjects one by one. In fact, the point of the exhibition is to establish photography as a significant art form in a country where it has never ranked with painting, literature, music or, more recently, film.
The second world war left Italy in a shambles that proved fruitful for art. A republic was born amid the rubble and, after decades of fascist mythmaking, a new artistic frankness thrived. Yet one form of stylistic narrowness gave way to another — novelists, film-makers and photo graphers subscribed to the tenets of neorealism and united around a common project: to portray their devastated country unsparingly, with all its squalor, toughness and hope.
Consider these names: Fellini, Antonioni, Olmi, De Sica, Rossellini, Pasolini, Visconti, Scorsese, Coppola – the most compelling film artists of modern times, in this country and in Italy, not to mention the rest of the West. And yet the image world out of which they grew, the photographic milieu that nurtured all of them, that connected the diaspora Italians in New York (and Buenos Aires, among other places) with the home country, has never been explored in depth in the United States. Until now.
Why photographers, who were in the vanguard of these efforts, are so unknown outside Italy (and even within it) is one of the mysteries that curator Enrica Viganó and the essayists in the catalog have sought to answer and to redress. The illuminating exhibition will be a crash course in post-war Italian cultural history for most Americans, introducing them to dozens of unfamiliar names.
In this day and age, it can be costly to take a gorgeous view of Earth’s natural environs for granted. It could be gone tomorrow; replaced by a building, a new exurb development, or another earth-shattering search for natural resources. However, while eco-activist-innovators are researching and planning the future of cities and urban development, New York University’s Grey Art Gallery has mounted a curious exhibition, Landscapes after Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime.
Down in the village in New York City, Washington Square Park is a fitting verdant backdrop for Landscapes after Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime, the current show at Grey Art Gallery.
What is the sublime in nature? The exhibition Landscapes after Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime, at New York University's Grey Art Gallery, addresses this question. With some 60 artworks by over 45 artists, the artist-curator Joel Sternfeld makes the case that contemporary landscapes' sense of the sublime is quite different from that of the nineteenth-century.
Article in Portuguese. Uma original exposição na Grey Art Gallery de Nova Iorque dá conta da evolução do sublime no nosso tempo. [An original exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery in New York gives an account of the evolution of the sublime in our time]