'IL MODO ITALIANO'

摘要

To examine an entire century of Italian design is a daunting undertaking. To examine those one hundred years of Italian design in conjunction with the same period in Italian avant-garde art, to focus on both simultaneously, and to make the appropriate connections between the two, is formidable. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, and the Mart (Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy) has undertaken just such a task in presenting "il Modo Italiano: Italian design and Avant-garde in the 20th Century." Three hundred and eighty works-a century of tables, chairs, lamps, typewriters, televisions, telephones, radios, scooters, posters, clocks, coffeepots and more, juxtaposed with painting, prints, sculpture, photography and film. At first, one has the impression of entering a very cluttered home, the artworks wedged in between too many chairs and tables. One wants to simplify and synthesize, to tell the story of twentieth-century Italian design by focusing on lamps, tables or typewriters. Let's choose the coffeepot. What could be more quintessentially Italian than coffee? And fortunately, to help us synthesize, the curators have neatly divided this long century into four sections: Boundless Optimism, Monumentality and Rationalism, Reconstruction and the Economic Miracle and the Postmodern Testing Ground.