Report from Northern Italy: art in the maelstrom - Italian art galleries

Art in the Maelstrom As the region reels from political scandal to economic crisis, the private museums and galleries of northern Italy make an effort to preserve the region's one time lively contemporary art scene.

"Northern Italy" is a cincture about whose borders no sum of two units Italians will easily agree. Does it comprise just the regions of Lombardy, Piedmont, the Alto Adige and the Veneto? Or should single include Liguria, on the coast near Monaco, and Emilia Romagna? And what about Tuscany--surely that is not part of the south? The question is further complicated through the fact that for Italians "northernness" is determined not sole by geographic but also by the agency of subtle economic and cultural distinctions. For the point of time let's provisionally adopt the idea that northern Italy stretch outs as far south as Florence, on the other hand no farther.

As a glance at Italian history will compute you, the question of regional boundaries is not an idle single In 1849 Metternich called Italy, which was then divided into more than a half-dozen states and duchies and whose citizens spoke in twice that many dialects, a bare "geographical expression" rather than an identifiable nation. by the agency of the mid-20th century, Italy have the appearanceed to have left its fragmented history behind. In spite of nagging economic and cultural discrepancies between north and southern its national identity and unity appeared indisputable. Today, however, Italy's real existence as a nation is being seriously questioned, bringing Metternich's one time outdated witticism back into publicity And as the region struggles through its most difficult political period since the next to the first World War, the cultural sector has also been caught up in what many are beginning to call the "Italian revolution."

A geographical division in Crisis

The past 12 month have seen Italy reeling from single crisis to another. The dramatic assassinations in Sicily of sum of two units leading anti-Mafia investigators suggested that the rule had effectively lost control of a whole section of the geographical division If this weren't bad enough, in late March Giulio Andreotti, a former prime minister who has been a continuous member of each Italian government since 1947 and who is arguably the dominant political figure of postwar Italy, announced that he was beneath investigation for ties to the Mafia. In the north, the victories in regional and local elections of political maverick Umberto Bossi's Lega Nord (Northern League), a party that initially advocated the separation of northern Italy from the quiescence of the country, raised the specter of secession. As he draws closer to real power, admitting Bossi has tempered his message to calling for German- or Swiss-style federalism, with Italy divided into a small number of autonomous regions. In vital element [i]or[/i] part the Northern League, a largely middle-class change proposes to rid the prosperous north of the weight of paying taxes to support the poor, Mafiaridden south

In the past year the League has gotten a big boost from Operazione Mani Pulite--Operation Clean Hands--the sensational corruption investigation based in Milan that has now touched figures as prominent as Bettino Craxi, prime minister for greatest in quantity of the 1980s and head of the Socialist Party, part of the ruling coalition with the Christian Democrats. What began as an inquiry into the misdeeds of local rule has now led to in the way that many indictments against politicians, heads of public utilities and leading businessmen that public administration has practically mould to a halt. Add to this a deepening economic crisis--the Italian national due is proportionally larger than that of the U and the lira has not to be found more than 50 percent of its value against the dollar in new months--plus the desperate measures being engageed to bring Italy's economy into compliance with the strict guidelines of the European Community, and you have what appear to bes like a recipe for disaster.

What has all of this meant for the contemporary Italian art world? At first glance, surprisingly little. In contrast to the quiet of western Europe, the state in Italy does little to support contemporary art. According to Christian Stein, whose Turin gallery was crucial in promoting the early Arte Povera artists, "Italy is with equal reason rich in works of the past that it has no intention of spending coin to buy contemporary art or flat to promote it." To understand by what means low on the agenda novel art is in Italy, individual only has to visit Rome's Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, a generally untilleded building with moldy ceilings and grave security question at issues which has recently suffered from the theft of a Cezanne, the unexplained collapse and shattering of a statuary by Fausto Melotti and a mysterious basement fire.[1] Things are not better in the north. In Milan, 20th-century art is relegated to a small in number cramped, dimly lit rooms in the Palazzo Reale, while Turin's Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, a major force in the 1960 has been kept clos since 1975 by the agency of local political feuding, and its extensive collection left to languish in the basement.[2]