On the occasion of the exhibition “Picasso: Fifty Years Later”, organized by the Elmhurst Art Museum 50 years after Pablo Picasso‘s death, the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago is promoting a meeting with Christine Poggi, Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
The theme of the meeting, scheduled for 2 December at the Elmhurst Art Museum, is the relationship between Picasso and the Italian avant-garde. For the occasion, Christine Poggi will present her book In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage.
The lecture will start with an account of when artist Gino Severini, who was living in Paris, encouraged his fellow Italian Futurists to spend a few weeks in the French capital where they would have the opportunity to visit the studios of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. What the Italians saw proved shocking, but also spurred further innovation, leading to subsequent visits to Paris that enabled Futurists to develop their own distinctive goals and techniques.
Christine Poggi will therefore explore the responses of artists Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, and Luigi Russolo to Cubism, and Picasso’s art, in particular. She will also address the early polymaterial experiments of Giacomo Balla, who, like Picasso, began to employ a diversity of materials in pictorial and sculptural works in the years leading up to World War I. The event is part of the Europe Without Borders program, the 2023 series sponsored by EUNIC Chicago (European Union National Institutes of Culture).
