Homage to Italian Sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro

Bill in front of the 'opening' piece, Le Battaglie ("The Battles" 1995), which Pomodoro says was inspired by Paolo Uccello's "La Battaglia di San Romano" ("The Battle of San Romano" - first half of 1400s) in Siena. (Hisham Matar's "A Month in Siena" has many incisive pages devoted to this painting.)

Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro died a little over 2 weeks ago, June 22, the day before his 99th birthday. His works are prominently featured in Rome, including his "smooth-skinned orb slashed to reveal a complex core"--to borrow from the New York Times obit here in front of the Farnesina (the Italian Department of State/Foreign Affairs). To mark his passing from his extraordinarily fruitful life - to the end - we are reprinting here our June 2023 review of an extensive and educational (for us) exhibit of his works in the Fendi-restored Palazzo della Civilta' Romano in EUR.

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A little late to the game, we "discovered" Arnaldo Pomodoro, thanks to a newspaper ad on the opening of a new exhibition of some of his large-scale works at Fendi's gallery at the restored Palazzo della Civilta' Romano in EUR. It's not that we hadn't seen his work before - we have long appreciated the globe/sphere in front of the Farnesina, the Italian "state department" in Rome. His "sphere within a sphere" are all over the world, we now know.

The exhibition at Fendi  - Il Grande Teatro delle Civilta' - "The Great Theater of Civilizations" - is remarkable for its installation of numerous enormous works - on the scale of Richard Serra's (though Pomodoro's are one-sided - one cannot walk in and around them).

The Palazzo (also known as the "Square Coliseum") is itself so imposing that at first we found Pomodoro's works installed outside of it simply too small and squatty.

Case in point, right.  Dianne tries to figure out what it is - against the backdrop of a much more imposing statue from the building's original design. Turns out it's Agamemnon, and the design was for a Greek theater production in 2014 in Siracusa and so, makes sense. It wasn't designed for this place.

Two aspects of the exhibit appealed to us. First, the delight of children grooving to the artwork, as at left.

Second, the excellent and informative flat material that gives shape to Pomodoro's lengthy career. He's about to turn 97 (the English language Wikipedia entry says his active years WERE 1954-2005 - whoops!). These are displayed in bright, large glass cases, slide-out drawers - both vertical and horizontal. We were intrigued by his work in the graphics medium.

And we learned about the placement of his works around the world. Newspaper articles and drawings showed that one of his obelisk-type sculptures had been installed on the Gianicolo, in a highly visible but unlikely spot - the traffic circle on the way up to the Bambino Gesu' Hospital that hosts the large entrances to the bus parking for the hordes visiting St. Peter's and the Vatican (you can also access the Caput Mundi shopping mall Bill wrote about recently from this underground parking venue). Below is the sketch - but it must have been there because there also were photos of it being installed. We missed it "in the flesh."

Left, Dianne checking out one of the drawers with sketches, newspaper articles, graphic works, and explanations. (If only my kitchen drawers worked this well!)

A hand-out at the exhibition shows the location of Pomodoro's works around Rome. We later were on a tour of Palazzo dello Sport (Nervi's ground-breaking building for the 1960 Olympics; Ali - as Cassius Clay - won his gold medal here), which features a Pomodoro obelisk in another once-traffic-circle (named Piazzale Pier Luigi Nervi), now abandoned and rather forlorn.

The photo at right shows the condition of the piazza and statue.

We've heard the complaint (and are tempted ourselves) to view Pomodoro as a "one-trick pony." If you unwrap the obelisk, it looks like the flat pieces. The shapes are similar throughout his work. 

The exhibition at Fendi ends with a newer piece (1996-97, below) that is a complement in white to the introductory Le Battaglie that leads off this post.

To us, it didn't seem to move the needle much in terms of his art. 

The title of the work is Movimento in pieno aria e nel profondo ("Movement in free space and in the depths" - or something like that!).

Close-up at right.

On the other hand, if one looks at his costumes, graphic work, public art - the way it is placed in the world, his vision seems greater.  

We close with some of these other pieces, including our having fun with them - which is a benefit of art as well.

If you can't get to Rome to see Il Grande Teatro delle Civilta' - "The Great Theater of Civilizations" before it closes October 1, the website is comprehensive. It includes all the works, plus a visual tour, plus a map of his works all over the world.

In Italian and English here: https://arnaldopomodoro.fendi.com/en/

Dianne

RST with one of the costumes, this one from 1986 for Didone (Dido), one of my favorite tragic heroines. .

There's a relationship between the faux "printer's wheel" outside (Rotativa di Babilonia - Babylon's wheel, 1991) and the graphics-type work inside (Tracce I-VII - Traces 1-7, 1998) (above and below).

A close-up of Il cubo ("The Cube," 1961-62), one of the first works in the show, and one one of us found intriguing - maybe because it had some "white space" in it.

Below is the most recent of Pomodoro's sculptures in the exhibition - Continuum, 2010 - one that seems to highlight made-up hieroglyphics. Pomodoro's large, rectangular pieces remind us of Richard Serra's, but the Italian sculptor's are very much 2-dimensional with bas relief, not the 3-dimensional, run-around-and-through-it of Serra.

The artist with his barbed take on Fendi's Peekaboo bag - on display during the exhibition: 

(Image credit: Carlos & Dario Tettamanzi)

Sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro and Fendi Put On a Show

Bill in front of the 'opening' piece, Le Battaglie ("The Battles" 1995), which Pomodoro says was inspired by Paolo Uccello's "La Battaglia di San Romano" ("The Battle of San Romano" - first half of 1400s) in Siena. (Hisham Matar's "A Month in Siena" has many incisive pages devoted to this painting.)

A little late to the game, we "discovered" Arnaldo Pomodoro, thanks to a newspaper ad on the opening of a new exhibition of some of his large-scale works at Fendi's gallery at the restored Palazzo della Civilta' Romano in EUR. It's not that we hadn't seen his work before - we have long appreciated the globe/sphere in front of the Farnesina, the Italian "state department" in Rome. His "sphere within a sphere" are all over the world, we now know.

The exhibition at Fendi  - Il Grande Teatro delle Civilta' - "The Great Theater of Civilizations" - is remarkable for its installation of numerous enormous works - on the scale of Richard Serra's (though Pomodoro's are one-sided - one cannot walk in and around them).

The Palazzo (also known as the "Square Coliseum") is itself so imposing that at first we found Pomodoro's works installed outside of it simply too small and squatty.

Case in point, right.  Dianne tries to figure out what it is - against the backdrop of a much more imposing statue from the building's original design. Turns out it's Agamemnon, and the design was for a Greek theater production in 2014 in Siracusa and so, makes sense. It wasn't designed for this place.

Two aspects of the exhibit appealed to us. First, the delight of children grooving to the artwork, as at left.

Second, the excellent and informative flat material that gives shape to Pomodoro's lengthy career. He's about to turn 97 (the English language Wikipedia entry says his active years WERE 1954-2005 - whoops!). These are displayed in bright, large glass cases, slide-out drawers - both vertical and horizontal. We were intrigued by his work in the graphics medium.

And we learned about the placement of his works around the world. Newspaper articles and drawings showed that one of his obelisk-type sculptures had been installed on the Gianicolo, in a highly visible but unlikely spot - the traffic circle on the way up to the Bambino Gesu' Hospital that hosts the large entrances to the bus parking for the hordes visiting St. Peter's and the Vatican (you can also access the Caput Mundi shopping mall Bill wrote about recently from this underground parking venue). Below is the sketch - but it must have been there because there also were photos of it being installed. We missed it "in the flesh."

Left, Dianne checking out one of the drawers with sketches, newspaper articles, graphic works, and explanations. (If only my kitchen drawers worked this well!)

A hand-out at the exhibition shows the location of Pomodoro's works around Rome. We later were on a tour of Palazzo dello Sport (Nervi's ground-breaking building for the 1960 Olympics; Ali - as Cassius Clay - won his gold medal here), which features a Pomodoro obelisk in another once-traffic-circle (named Piazzale Pier Luigi Nervi), now abandoned and rather forlorn.

The photo at right shows the condition of the piazza and statue.

We've heard the complaint (and are tempted ourselves) to view Pomodoro as a "one-trick pony." If you unwrap the obelisk, it looks like the flat pieces. The shapes are similar throughout his work. 

The exhibition at Fendi ends with a newer piece (1996-97, below) that is a complement in white to the introductory Le Battaglie that leads off this post.

To us, it didn't seem to move the needle much in terms of his art. 

The title of the work is Movimento in pieno aria e nel profondo ("Movement in free space and in the depths" - or something like that!).

Close-up at right.

On the other hand, if one looks at his costumes, graphic work, public art - the way it is placed in the world, his vision seems greater.  

We close with some of these other pieces, including our having fun with them - which is a benefit of art as well.

If you can't get to Rome to see Il Grande Teatro delle Civilta' - "The Great Theater of Civilizations" before it closes October 1, the website is comprehensive. It includes all the works, plus a visual tour, plus a map of his works all over the world.

In Italian and English here: https://arnaldopomodoro.fendi.com/en/

Dianne

RST with one of the costumes, this one from 1986 for Didone (Dido), one of my favorite tragic heroines. .

There's a relationship between the faux "printer's wheel" outside (Rotativa di Babilonia - Babylon's wheel, 1991) and the graphics-type work inside (Tracce I-VII - Traces 1-7, 1998) (above and below).

A close-up of Il cubo ("The Cube," 1961-62), one of the first works in the show, and one one of us found intriguing - maybe because it had some "white space" in it.

Below is the most recent of Pomodoro's sculptures in the exhibition - Continuum, 2010 - one that seems to highlight made-up hieroglyphics. Pomodoro's large, rectangular pieces remind us of Richard Serra's, but the Italian sculptor's are very much 2-dimensional with bas relief, not the 3-dimensional, run-around-and-through-it of Serra.

The artist with his barbed take on Fendi's Peekaboo bag - on display during the exhibition: 

(Image credit: Carlos & Dario Tettamanzi)

Sanford Biggers and the American Academy in Rome: Destruction and Creation

Sanford Biggers' art is astounding in its variety and materiality. We were fortunate to see several of his quilt works, and to talk with him, at the American Academy in Rome's Open Studios  in 2018.

Biggers and his art were profiled recently in a full-page New York Times Sunday feature.  He has shows coming up in the Bronx, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. Biggers' art has ranged from his use of vintage quilts to create new art to his BAM series that deals with the killing of blacks by police (which he says he can't work on or watch at this time - "There's a point where there's no longer any detachment from these things happening").

The quilts were his primary focus when he was a Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts at the Academy. We took photos of five that were on the walls of his studio there.

Fascinated as we were with his work, I was also troubled by his cutting apart, or covering over parts of, vintage quilts. It reminded me of Ai Weiwei breaking a Han Dynasty vase. Of course, in that case the vase was worth $1 million, and breaking it was Ai's point. (Here's the video if you want to re-live it.)

In response to my questions, Biggers seemed untroubled by what some may think of as destruction of these objects, objects that he and others value. As he said to the NYT reporter, commenting on the seminal "Quilts of Gee's Bend" show he saw at the Whitney Museum in 2002,  "There was color, modulation, rhythm, and all these compositional things. But seeing them in these beautiful textile works made by a woman's hands, it was touching on sculpture, touching on the body, touching on politics."  (I was surprised the NYT didn't ask this question.)

A portion of Maude Bennett's quilt made for
Dianne from material used to make Dianne dresses.

I may be somewhat protective of "the quilt," because my grandmother was a quilter. She made me quilts, many from scraps of fabric she had after making me dresses.  So, as a girl, I had the echoes of my dresses in the quilt on my bed. (See photo left.)  And, of course, she's no longer here (she died in 1984 at age 98), but her quilts are still with our family.

Biggers said he saw himself, in contrast to destroying, as perpetuating the life of some of these quilts, making them more long-lasting and visible than not. One of his quilt projects projects "codes" from the Underground Railroad onto the quilts. And he also sees his quilts projects as more an art of process than of object. He said he sits with the quilts for months or years, and then when he starts working on one, "it's led by what the material is going to give back."

A Rome influence in Biggers art appears in busts he is making in bronze and marble, with artisans in Italy, combining African sculptural traits with Greco-Roman ones.

Biggers and a guest in his studio at the Academy.

As the Open Studio times were drawing to a close, Biggers and his wife and then infant daughter were enjoying the outdoor music and sculpture "unveiling" in the Academy's front courtyard. 

In a corner of the studio - an artwork or
the tools of his trade? Hard to tell with
Biggers (but I still didn't touch it).

The Open Studios - which our friend Dana Prescott (now Executive Director of Civitella Ranieri international cultural center in Umbria) began when she was Associate Director at the Academy - have been an annual ritual and we hope one that will start again post-Covid. They are a benefit the Academy - which itself benefits from Rome  (one might even say the experience is "priceless") - can give back to Romans.

Dianne

In Memoriam: Frederika Randall's review of Mario Sironi exhibit at the Vittoriano

Frederika Randall, an exceptional person, writer, and friend, died Tuesday, May 12 at her home in Rome, where she lived with her husband and loving and intellectual companion, Vittorio Jucker. Born in Western Pennsylvania, Frederika lived the last 35 years of her life in Italy. Her keen eye and judgment made her a valued public intellectual (a term she asked us not to use - you can't complain now, Frederika), publishing trenchant cultural and political commentary in The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her bio of herself here explains her life journey and also her lifetime of significant accomplishments and awards. She was a translator of the nearly-untranslatable, bringing to life authors as diverse as the 19th-century Ippolito Nievo ("Confessions of an Italian") and 21st- century Giacomo Sartori ("I am God").

In Frederika's memory, we are re-posting several of the posts--which remain popular--she wrote for RST. We re-posted  "Liberation Day: The Politics of  'Bella Ciao'" just 3 weeks ago (not knowing how precarious her life was at that point) for Italy's locked-down Liberation Day. Ten days ago we re-posted her review of a Renato Guttuso exhibit. Here we re-post her 2014 review of a show at the Complesso Vittoriano featuring the 20th-century Italian artist Mario Sironi. The review illustrates everything we've just said about Frederika - her keen eye, her trenchant criticism, her lyrical writing. She will live on in our--and all her friends' and family's--memories, and in the eclectic body of work she left to the world.

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Sironi, Self Portrait

You have a great artist in your midst, perhaps the greatest of these times, and you don’t know it. Picasso, addressing feckless 20^th-century Italians, was talking about Mario Sironi. It was a peculiar tribute, coming from a man who belonged to the Communist party until the day he died. While Sironi, on the other hand, was a believing Fascist even before 1921, when he began working as graphic artist for Mussolini’s paper, Il Popolo d'Italia and the review Gerarchia. He even adhered to the Republic of Salò, the German-backed Italian puppet state of 1943-45, and that was much more of a minority camp than Fascism ever was.

For a taste of this political outlier—and yes, great painter—I recommend Sironi 1885-1961 show at the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome until February 8, 2015. There are ninety paintings, graphic works and sketches for murals neatly organized to follow the artist’s life path: born in 1885, studies in

engineering, a nervous breakdown, art school, meeting Boccioni and Balla, Futurism, the Novecento, bleak urban landscapes, a brief Metaphysical phase, Fascist illustration, publicity for automaker Fiat, an Expressionist turn, followed by the huge murals commissioned by Mussolini for new Fascist public buildings in Milan and Rome.

Things looked bad for Sironi when the Liberation came on April 25, 1945. He took the road out of Milan toward Como and Switzerland, like many Fascists who feared partisan reprisals, and not wrongly. On foot, his dog on a leash by his side, Sironi was stopped at a partisan checkpoint, and only when the poet and children’s writer (and partisan) Gianni Rodari stepped in, was he saved from being shot. After the war, Sironi continued painting, and the vein of melancholy that colors everything he produced seems to have deepened into something like despair. There was no place for a man like him in a postwar Italy where all the artists and intellectuals were anti-Fascists.

This exhibit, the first in Italy dedicated to Sironi in twenty years, was curated by art historian Elena Pontiggia, who provides a very useful biographical framework to hang the artwork on, both in a short film and the good wall quotes.




This doesn’t quite compensate for the fact that not many of Sironi’s greatest paintings are on
display, or that this show is much smaller than that of 1994, which had 400
artworks. But Pontiggia does bring out a crucial fact: that Sironi was a life-long depressive, a man of melancholy who it would seem should have been quite unsuited to the Fascist regime’s celebration of might and right.

Even as a young man Sironi would close himself up in his rooms, seeing no-one, drawing obsessively. “He’ll copy a Greek head 20 or 25 times!!!” reported  Boccioni (exclamation marks his). The Futurists disapproved of antiquated art.

Urban Landscape, 1922

Yet Sironi’s most powerful works are those that don’t celebrate Fascism, modernity, or industry. His urban landscapes, some of them painted in the early 1920s, others after World War II, are haunting, and haunted. When in 1922 he produced one of several paintings titled Urban Landscape, Sironi was staying alone in a cheap hotel in Milan, too poor to bring his new wife there to live with him. Dusty white and brick-colored industrial buildings, a great black swath of train track, a tiny tram and a tiny truck. The only thing that looks animate in the composition is the lowering green and grey sky.

The Yellow Truck, 1918

In another cityscape shown here, an ashy black truck stands immobile where two utterly empty streets of factories and warehouses intersect. There is no life or movement in the painting, just beautiful volumes. Once again, only the sky is alive, with big brushstrokes of smoke and cloud.

The Yellow Truck, 1918, is another work from this period. Big rough brushstrokes, in part painted on newsprint, it suggests a Futurist enthusiasm for the vehicle itself that is utterly absent in urban scenes done even a few years later.

Urban Landscape, 1920

In another urban landscape painted in 1920, a hard brown wall hides what seems to be a construction site. Again, the night sky is roiling overhead. Sironi is no longer celebrating the dynamism of the machine that was Futurism’s trademark. The only thing that’s dynamic is the air. When it comes to the work he did in the 1930s, Fascism’s heyday, the show tries to persuade us that although he worked for the cause, his murals and wall decorations (here, sketches for his mosaic Justice Between Law and Force in the Milan Court of Assizes) were never propaganda for Fascism. But like so many efforts to rescue Sironi from his politics, this doesn’t really ring true. Fascism was not just Blackshirts and castor oil; it was a political creed based on just the kind of myths that Sironi produced in his large allegorical murals. They embody a kind of immobilism, an image of the best of all possible worlds that need never change. Sironi was happy to accept those mural commissions because he wanted to make art for the people, not for bourgeois sitting rooms. But that, too, was a thread of Fascism.

Urban Landscape, 1922

My Funeral, 1960

After the war, Sironi continued to paint, and there are several more gloomy cityscapes here, often painted in a thick impasto of brown, blue and white, that are very striking. He died in 1961, not before producing a small tempera work, My Funeral, in which a tiny hearse in one corner of the picture is followed by a tiny handful of mourners. “Let us hope that after so many storms, so many gales, so much bestial suffering,” he wrote, “that there will nevertheless be a port for this miserable heart to find peace and quiet."  

Fifty years later, his reputation as an artist has been largely detached from his role as a Fascist, but you couldn’t exactly say he rests in peace.

Frederika Randall, Rome

A Tree Lives in Rome: Giuseppe Penone's art installations in the City.

Foglie di Pietra  in Largo Goldoni

Giuseppe Penone's massive tree-like sculptures have dominated Rome's art scene over the past few years, and one is now on permanent public display.

Another view of Foglie di Pietra  in Largo Goldoni

We'd say don't miss it, but it's hard not to.  The large sculpture, entitled Foglie di Pietra ("Leaves of Stone"), occupies a prominent spot on Largo Goldini, along via del Corso in front of the Fendi store there.  It's Fendi, the luxury brand, that paid for the sculpture and its installation.

"Penone, Fogie di Pietra stupiranno Roma" - "Penone, Leaves of Stone will astonish Rome" reads the headline of an article describing the installation of the work and using Penone's verb, "stupire" - to astonish, surprise or make wonder.  The work "rises on high because I'm working on public ground that shouldn't occupy space," said Penone.  The trees, weighing 11 tons, are designed to "provoke a sense of wonder that should make one reflect on the meaning of the work:  the reality that surrounds it, the architecture of the city based on naturalism.....it's also a reflection of the material, the marble, and nature.  The Corinthian capital [see top photo - it's the white block] represents historical memory.  I put the block on high to indicate the elevation of man and to make one think about the ruins underground below."

In 2009, Penone's work was the subject of a large exhibition at Villa Medici, the French academy in Rome.  Any time a show occupies the inside space at Villa Medici, including the ancient cistern, and the outside space, it's a great experience.  The tree and stone theme was evident in 2009 as well.











Earlier this year, as part of Fendi's grand opening of its headquarters in the Palazzo della Civilta' Romana (the Fascist era "Square Coliseum," the restoration of which Fendi also financed) in EUR, it sponsored Matrice, an exhibition of Penone's more recent work.  Speaking of this show, Penone said, "The trees appear solid, but if we observe them over time, from their birth, they become fluid and malleable.  A tree is a being that memorizes its own form."  That exhibition closed in July; some photos of it follow.

Penone, born in 1947, is considered part of the Arte Povera movement.  For those non-Italians,the Arte Povera movement was active primarily in the 1960s and 1970s and includes artists such as Jannis Kounellis, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Mario and Marisa Merz.  The movement was marked by the use of "poor" or "impoverished" materials and promoted art free of established conventions.  Some of these principles still inform Penone's work.

Dianne

Outdoor sculpture in front of the Square Coliseum, EUR
part of the Matrice exhibit (no longer there).

Fendi's entrance to the restored Square Coliseum.