Figures of Climax of the Impersonal Empire

To quote its curator, Germano Celant, the exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918-1943 at Fondazione Prada is “an immersive experience” which “reinserts works in their original communication space” and is dedicated to intellectuals’ active during that period, during which populism eventually took over.

The exhibition here, taking place in the home of G. L. Luzzatto, is a tribute to the writer, who was actively engaged in the defense of modern art and fought against the rise of fascism and antisemitism in this period of radical changes.

The way of writing about art has changed a lot since then. What used to characterize the art writings of the first half of the 20th century was often a form of analytical autopsy of the subjective emotions of the writer in front of an artwork. If we analyze the writings of some art critics from the 1930s, we realize that what they were doing was not exactly celebrating the mere explosions of sensations and feelings experienced in the presence of an artwork but describing them, almost scientifically. The writer was not so much glorifying this emotion as he was pointing to the mechanism generating it.