Università Roma Tre

MODERNISM AND MODERNISMS, 1880-1940

This course introduces students to the historical developments and key figures in the visual arts of modernism - from around 1880 to 1940 - focusing on issues such as their relationship to technology and new media (photography, cinema), political and social context, urban and natural environments, and psychic life. These artistic experiences not only helped to transform the nature of aesthetic experience, opening up new forms of sensibility, but also radically redefined the understanding of individual and collective reality.

The analysis of the different trends and poetics will also provide the basic methodology for the study of the media and languages that characterise art between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing the critical tools essential for reading different types of works.

Stephen Kern, Il tempo e lo spazio, Il Mulino 2007: capitoli 4: Il futuro; 5: La velocità; 6: La natura dello spazio, pp. 117-226 (PDF)
Philippe Dubois, L'atto fotografico, Urbino 2009, pp. 25-108 (PDF)
Additional texts will be indicated in the course of the lectures.

The course analyzes the relationship between art and the environment, starting from the avant-gardes to the second half of the twentieth century in which artistic intervention explodes in installations, often realized in situ or site-specific, in the exhibition space, in nature or in public space.
Although women artists have made a fundamental contribution to these practices, the historical exhibitions that have dedicated in-depth analysis to these aspects of research have almost ignored their contribution. This has led to the marginalization of figures who have only in recent years been recovered by studies through monographic studies or collective exhibitions such as "Ambienti 1956-2010. Environments by Women Artists" (ongoing at the Maxxi Museum, Rome, from 10 April to 20 October 2024). Starting from these considerations, we will focus on theoretical and methodological perspectives that substantiate current historical-artistic research in questioning the dominant patriarchal canon and will propose a reflection on the rewriting of the history of the international environment.
From the relationship between art and the environment, the course will also focus on the exhibition as an installation and immersive space and on the forms of the contemporary art museum, in the dynamics of spectatorship and multimedia and multisensory dimension.
The following topics will be analysed:
- Beyond painting and sculpture. The relationship between art and space in Futurism, Constructivism and Dada;
- Marcel Duchamp's exhibitions and curatorial practice;
- Environment and Happening;
- From Arte Povera to Land Art;
- A new ideology of the exhibition space: exhibitions and galleries between the Sixties and Seventies;
- Site specific and time specific: environmental installations as immersive spaces;
Three exhibitions compared: Lo spazio dell'immagine / The space of the image (1967), Arte/Ambiente / Environment / Art (1976), Environments 1956-2010. Environments by Women Artists (2024).

1) D. Riout, L’arte del ventesimo secolo. Protagonisti, temi, correnti, Einaudi, Torino 2002

2) F. Poli. F. Bernardelli, Mettere in scena l’arte contemporanea. Dallo spazio dell’opera allo spazio intorno all’opera, Johan & Levi, Milano 2016

3). Texts and images projected during lectures (available at the end of the course in teams).