Guggenheim ready to host Italian Futurism

"Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe": this extraordinary exhibition will have its opening at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on Feb. 21, 2014.

This outstanding show has been organized to re-evatuale and broaden the notion of what avant-garde means, focusing on one of Europe's most important 20th-century movements.

Vivien Greene, the Guggenheim's curator of 19th- and early-20th-century art, successfully gathered 375 works coming from European museums and private collections. Although the majority is made of paintings and drawings, a huge selection of "other kind of pieces" will be on display, adding a unique touch to the whole show.

This is actually the first exhibition of Italian Futurism organized in the United States, examining the historical sweep of the movement from its inception with F. T. Marinetti's Futurist manifesto in 1909, through its demise at the end of World War II. The Guggenheim is right in introducing it as a multidisciplinary show, as beyond paintings, it is going to encompass sculpture, architecture, design, ceramics, fashion, film, photography, advertising, free-form poetry, publications, music, theatre, and performance, all executed between 1909 and 1944.

Futurism was an international art movement founded in Italy in 1909, although there where parallel movements in several other countries, mainly Russia and Englang. Born as a refreshing contrast to the weepy sentimentalism of Romanticism, Futurism tended to emphasize anything that could be associated with the contemporary idea of future, such as speed, noise, machines, pollution, cities, technology and youth.

Among the key figures of the movement there are several Italians, such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, Antonio Sant'Elia, Bruno Munari and Luigi Russolo, a few Russians, such as Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Igor Severyanin, David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as the Portuguese Almada Negreiros.

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