Two exhibitions by Patricia Satterlee have bookended the plague year.
Marino Marini
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The Pursuit of Art, 2019
MoMA’s recognition of modernism’s multiverse, alongside artist-led drives for greater transparency on the part of museums and their boards, brought a twinge of optimism to the close of the year.
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Marino Marini’s Scarred Monumentality
Marini’s membership in the Fascist Party is something that will cling to him, despite his self-exile to Switzerland and the anti-imperialist tone of his postwar work.
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Loaded History: Marino Marini’s Armless Juggler
VATICAN CITY — Modern art has achieved a slightly higher profile at the Vatican Museum these days (relatively speaking, of course): among other offerings, the recently opened Borgia apartments are currently filled with sometimes ordinary, sometimes exceptional selections of mid-20th-century Italian sculpture.
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When Modernism Ruled Europe
Between World War I and II, there was a strong gust of classicism that swept through the Western European avant-garde. Artists from across the continent embraced the language of the ancients as a way to reflect their own time and culture. This taste for antique forms can be interpreted in many different ways, including as an attempt to seek order in a tumultuous time, a way to cloak a modern ideology with powerful symbols, or a reaction to the radicalism of the previous decades. Regardless of the root cause or causes, the style that was at once familiar and dignified was a rich source of inspiration for artists, designers, and architects of all types.
This odd chapter in modern art is the subject of the Guggenheim Museum’s current exhibition Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936, which is a very attractive exhibition that gathers together a remarkable array of objects associated with almost every -ism from the era. The power of classicism is partly due to its malleability and how it was able to lend its voice to any and every modern movement that sought refuge in its silhouettes, drapery, linear logic, and airs of history.
