Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2007)
ANNUAL REPORT - A 2007. ÉV - MÓNIKA KUMIN: A Journey through Italian Art 1950-1980. One Hundred Works from the Farnesina Contemporary Italian Art Collection
The issue of the left-wing realism that had emerged at the beginning of the 1940s divided the representatives of Italian artistic life in the decade that followed World War II. The Corrente (Current) group and its emblematic figure Renato Guttuso created their own version of critical realism drawing mainly on the anti-fascist mentality of Picasso and his Cubist art. The group Forma (Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino LUCIO FONTANA, SPACE CONCEPT NO. 5. PARMA. GIUSEPPE N1CCOLI COLLECTION . . Guernni, Achille Perilli) formed in 1946 in Rome —partly from the former members of Corrente —moved from abstract Futurism towards abstraction, which operated with the visual power of the pure sign and pure forms. With abstraction forging ahead Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri became the leading figures of progressive Italian art. Fontana —evoking the spirit of Futurism —expressed and elaborated his theory in a manifesto entitled Spatializmo (Spatiality), which emphasised the role of real space, energy, and dynamism in art. With his concetti spaziali, which were perforated, ripped up monochrome canvases that he made from 1949 onwards Fontana initiated the surrounding space and light into his painting, and he later also did the same in his sculpture. The holes (bucht) and cuts (tagli) made on the canvas and the scraping and rending of the surface expand the painting into three dimensions and show space as a continuum embracing and penetrating all. With his "experiments in material" Alberto Burri also tended towards surpassing the traditional notions in painting. In his works the canvas is no more a mere medium for a picture. In his famous satchels (sacci) and hunches (gobbi) the canvas becomes an independent entity with a strong material quality. At the very beginning of the 1960s some Italian artists set themselves the task of creating a playful, ironic display of mass-produced objects, following the example of the "new Dada" trend in American art represented by Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Mimmo Rotella's tableaux composed of the fragments of torn-down placards (Retro d'affiche), the nuclear art (Arte
