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The Florentine
Martin Holman is a British writer and former Florence resident who often returns to Italy.
Ketty La Rocca is now considered one of the most distinctive Italian artists of the 1970s. Yet in 1976, the year La Rocca died, aged 37, one leading American commentator wrote that she had been ‘unable to break into the male art world with her art and her writing.&
Giuseppe Penone, for four decades one of contemporary art’s leading figures, has long sought to bridge the gap that consumerism has opened between our experiences of art and nature. With Florence’s unique skyline for background, the enclosed natural setting of the Boboli Gardens and Forte di
The careers of artists Dadamaino and James Lee Byars began in the late 1950s. There is no record that they met in life or that either was familiar with the other’s work before Byars died in 1997 and Dadamaino in 2004. But two exhibitions in Florence help to
As the Institute approaches its centenary in 2017, The Florentine meets Julia Race, director since last August, to explore the opportunities and challenges of being 100 years young in the era of online learning, virtual travel and widespread cultural tourism. Martin Holman: You are no stranger to Italy, having
Questions about the family as an institution regularly fill the pages of newspapers and magazines as well as the airwaves. So it is not surprising that artists around the world are participating in the debate. Inevitably, questions outweigh answers, but since the arts excel at testing theories and inverting assumptions
The small, edicola-sized interior of BASE Progetti per l’Arte in via San Niccolò provides unexpected proof that ‘precious things come in small packages’. In spite of its tiny setting—or, maybe, because of it—this non-profit-making exhibition space is probably
Before being installed in the Vasari Corridor, a recent addition to the Uffizi’s unrivalled collection of artists’ self-portraits is about to go on view at San Pier Scheraggio, the former church enclosed within Palazzo Vecchio. The subject of the work is American video artist Bill Viola,
Although Florence is a cultural capital with few equals on the planet, its immense historical legacy has tended to overshadow the place that contemporary art occupies in the city. Yet as recently as the 1960s and 70s, Florence was acknowledged as an avant-garde centre for visual arts and architecture
Italy is confronting the impact of migration. Although less than 9 percent of its population was born outside the country (below the average for European Union member states), immigration has risen dramatically since 2001 and poses questions about national borders as populations move in search of prosperity and security. The
The 55th Venice Biennale for visual art comprises 88 national pavilions located in every part of the city, each hosting its own exhibition. At the Biennale’s centre, in the Giardini and Arsenale, is the headline exhibition, The Encyclopaedic Palace, which alone includes 158 artists. In addition, 50 shows,
Beauty is a concept not immediately associated with visual art in the modern era. Although some artists pioneered the sublime detachment of abstraction, others appeared more concerned with the turmoil, grittiness and uncertainty of existence. Indeed, many practitioners may even have regarded the pursuit of beauty as irrelevant, even irresponsible.
In the late 1960s, the modern blockbuster art exhibition arrived and changed the museum landscape. Pioneered by such major institutions as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, these ambitious shows combined the art-world equivalents of Cinemascope, Technicolor, surround sound with a touch of Barnum and Bailey promotion.
There is no doubting Salvador Dalí’s popularity. His work continues to please, shock and titillate, generating food for thought and queues at the ticket office. The arrival of The Dalí ...
The new exhibition at the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina brings together rarely seen work by Francis Bacon, one of the last century's most distinctive figurative painters, with five artists who have sought to express the competing forces-psychological and social, memory and reality, history and common myth-that
Italy's Fascist dictatorship never enforced one style on the nation's artists. In the 1930s, therefore, traditional portraiture was practised alongside advanced abstraction in visual art and interior design. In architecture, classicism was revived for official buildings but modern streamlined structures were also built: Florence's main railway station,
The Galleria dell’Accademia has invited into its galleries artworks by 32 eminent modern and contemporary figures, from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol. Thousands visit the museum daily to see ...
As well as looking west in commemoration of Amerigo Vespucci's donation of his name to America, ambitious thematic exhibitions in Florence this summer are also looking east. At the Pitti Palace, exhibitions spanning 500 years of Japanese art trace points of cultural contact with Italy from the time of
For more than a century, Villa Romana has been the Florence base for artists visiting from Germany. Often still early in their careers, these artists are recipients of the Villa's annual fellowship, the Premio. From their creative presence comes the atmosphere of experiment, production and imaginative reserve that pervades
Greeting pedestrians and motorists carefully negotiating busy traffic at the roundabout in front of Porta Romana is a tall marble figure who appears to look two ways at once. The sculpture is the work of Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the leading exponents of Arte Povera, the Italian art phenomenon that
The American Dream of success through thrift and hard work has taken a battering in recent decades. Diverted from the traditional path to economic independence, ‘early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,' as in Benjamin Franklin's commonsense proverb, a ‘Super
Arabella Natalini has been one of the leading figures in contemporary art in Tuscany for more than 10 years. Part of the team that bid successfully to transform the vacant auditorium on viale Giannotti into the exhibition venue EX3, Natalini started 2012 with her appointment as the centre's co-
‘Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?’ asked Andy Warhol. The story of how Warhol repeated the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian modern ...
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, photographer Brian Duffy created the look of modern, creative Britain. With contemporaries David Bailey and Terence Donovan, Duffy (he was always known by his surname) enlivened the pages of the world's leading style magazines with fashion shots and advertising images that were as restless,
