What becomes of contact in a world of images? With the advent of mass culture in the 1960s, the image became the basic unit of consumption. Television sets, billboards and flimsy magazine spreads extended promises of opulence that remained, by design, out of reach. Imagine: New Imagery in Italian Art 1960-1969, a thoughtful show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, attempts to reconcile the opposing imperatives of an era at once remote and intimate. Many of the works on display recall the glib sensuality of advertisements—paradoxically one-dimensional appeals to the voluptuous three-dimensionality of their products. The exhibition vacillates between estrangement and encounter, image and object. At its best, it positions images as a way of reconstituting a viscerally material world, resuscitating the lost art of touch.
Centered mostly in Rome and Turin, Italian art of the 1960s was a sobering alternative to its gaudier American counterpart. The major Italian artists were familiar with the work of their American contemporaries. Mario Schifano, perhaps the most celebrated of his milieu, spent years in New York, where he forged a strong friendship with the poet and curator Frank O’Hara, and the important Roman gallery Galleria La Tartaruga displayed work by Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly in the late 1950s.
Yet despite Italian art's clear affinities with Pop art and Abstract Expressionism, it also departs markedly from these movements to gesture at a uniquely Italian aesthetic. Like Jasper Johns, Italian artists were interested in developing a visual vocabulary that drew on but subverted popular cultural symbols—but unlike American painters, Schifano and his peers had to contend with Italy’s wealth of inescapable historical associations. The artist Tano Festa remarked, “an American paints Coca-Cola as a value and for me painting Michelangelo is the same thing, in the sense that we are a country where instead of consuming canned food we consume the Mona Lisa on chocolates.”
Images of classical painting were so frequently iterated, so widely and relentlessly distributed, that their status shifted from image to icon: to depict Italian life was no longer to depict objects or actions but rather to depict depictions. “When a painting is popular, then you take it for granted like any other object: I was looking at this Grande Odalisque and thinking ‘I like this thing, I could put it in a painting just as I could a plant, an automobile, a window shutter,’” Festa said of his 1964 work Grande Odalisque.
The work is an immense collage in which Ingres’s nude is enlarged and plastered onto a series of otherwise blank panels. The original Grande Odalisque summons a woman who gazes provocatively over her shoulder, but Festa’s work evokes a different referent, this time via iconographic signification: it is a painting of a painting.
Imagine is full of such transpositions: icon into image, image into icon, and, most dramatically of all, images and icons into objects to be touched rather than merely recognised. Franco Angeli’s works, for instance, mimic the paradox of the cinematic screen. Traditionally devices of concealment, screens are transformed in the movie theater into instruments of visibility. Yet the tableaux that flicker so tantalizingly across them, extending false promises of photographic accuracy, are perhaps even more elaborate concealments. Angeli, who covers childishly legible paintings of papal crests and hammers-and-sickles in sheer nylon stockings, plays on this sense of disclosure and deception. Here, screens function once again as fabrics: not as surfaces onto which images can be projected, but as substances with their own densities. In King’s Solomon’s Mines (1962), a swastika swathed in a skein of stocking takes on a dreamlike quality. The work is, for a moment, more texture than sign: the swastika, concealed by the glimmer of the fabric, reverts for an instant to its primal iteration before we recognise it once again.
The monochromes on display in Imagine are similarly dual, both intensely abstracted and fiercely physical. Unlike depthless canvases by Ad Reinhardt or Yves Klein, Italian artists like Schifano and Francesco Lo Savio experimented with monochromes that are not “pure and crystalline” but rather “clotted, ultimately human,” as the curator Luca Massimo Barbero writes in the exhibition catalogue. Schifano’s aptly titled Monochrome (1961) is orange but subtly swirling, a soft intimation of motion. And Lo Savio’s Filter and Mesh (1962) is a wire checkerboard, a grid painting instantiated.
Schifano is up to something equivalent in the striking Winter through the Museum (1965). Black and white concentric circles intrude into upper right of the mural, while the outline of a human figure, presented as a series of overlaid body parts, seemingly stumbles out of the frame. The result is ordered but chaotic: we would never conflate these schemata with reality, but their careening, whirlwind movements disrupt the sense of abstraction established by the stark, provisional geometry of the painting, which has the breathless air of a study. Schifano situates Winter through the Museum on an imagistic plane, but he also animates it.
Perhaps the best pieces in Imagine are Domenico Gnoli’s paintings, which are, in their own way, as simultaneously flat and textured as Schifano’s. Gnoli himself expressed an aversion to the conceptual clutter of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical tradition, and his quiet, self-contained works are physical testaments to the solemnity of objects, which are so much more enduring than their human owners. Gnoli was also an illustrator, and his paintings—immense close-ups of clothing or furniture that evoke human forms without ever directly portraying them—are attentive to the ways in which consumer culture prioritises things over bodies.
Gnoli’s painting Shoulder (1969) depicts its namesake clad in a grey and faintly pinstriped suit. It is flat and stylised, like an image from a magazine, and yet the texture of the fabric is tangible and tactile. The painting is exaggeratedly zoomed-in, the shoulder grotesquely accessible, yet its owner remains impossibly distant: his head is presumably just beyond the edge of the canvas. Two Sleepers (1966), a painting not of sleepers but of a bed and a voluptuous red comforter beneath which we can barely discern what might be two pairs of legs, is more hopeful. Here, as in Angeli’s works, fabrics invite us to touch. There is a tenderness to this painting, suggesting that even if we are hidden in our things we may again be found in them, so long as we can make out the tremulous human forms beneath the images.
Becca Rothfeld is a freelance critic. She will begin as a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard in the fall
Imagine: New Imagery in Italian Art 1960-1969, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, until 19 September