The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968

The renewal of Italian visual culture in the quarter-century following the collapse of Mussolini's regime is documented in this impressive survey. This catalogue of an exhibition at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, where Celant is curator, combines 17 scholarly essays and 950 plates (600 in color) to delineate a liberal national identity in Italian painting, sculpture, crafts, cinema, industrial design, photography, architecture, fashion, graphics and literature. Beginning with the antifacist resistance and the Art Informel movement's experiments with materials, signs and collage in the 1950s, the panorama shifts to battles between neorealist cinema and escapist fare, between handicraft traditions and industrial mass culture, between abstract painting and figuration. It culminates in the 1968 protest consumerism, which gave rise to underground film, Arte Povera, radical architecture and living theater. This extraordinary volume captures the ferment, creativity and openness to new ideas that cut across many fields. (Feb.)