Methodologies of Exchange: MoMA's "Twentieth-Century Italian Art" (1949)

The third issue of “Italian Modern Art” journal by CIMA (Center for Italian Modern Art) is dedicated to MoMA 1949 exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art. The publication is based on the conference, “Methodologies of Exchange: The Exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art (MoMA, 1949)” organized by Raffaele Bedarida, Silvia Bignami and Davide Colombo at CIMA in New York in February 2019, in connection with the Annual Conference of the College Art Association and the 70th anniversary of the original exhibition. The conference was made possible by a Terra Foundation for American Art grant. The exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which constructed dominant interpretive keys that today continue to affect the study and perception of Italian modernism. In effect Twentieth-Century Italian Art was the first opportunity after World War II for American audiences to see the work of a substantial group of contemporary Italian artists. Curated by James Thrall Soby and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the exhibition was followed by a vast campaign of acquisitions: MoMA added key Italian artists, from Umberto Boccioni to Lucio Fontana, to its permanent collection and thereby situated them within the museum’s influential narrative of modernism. Further, the Italian show aided MoMA curators in revising their institutional perspective in the Cold War context, moving it beyond a Paris-centered canon. By studying this exhibition from multiple angles, this issue intends to explore and combine various methodological approaches. The initiative involved a group of international scholars who have focused on topics connected with Twentieth-Century Italian Art and the Italy-U.S. relationship from different fields of study, including exhibition histories, cultural transfer, cultural diplomacy, art and politics, the history of collecting, the history of the art market, and more.