Art Déco. Gli anni ruggenti in Italia, exhibition catalogue (Forlì, Museums San Domenico, 11th February – 18th June 2017) curated by Valerio Terraroli, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo, 2017 (ISBN: 9799936635450)
The Art Déco is not just a way to design and create objects, decorations, places, architecture, but it’s a taste, a behaviour, a language that, betraying its origin from the Austrian-German Secessions and the Avanguards of the beginning of the Twentieth century overviews, overwhelmingly emerges after the war and controls its own creative parabola and its own reasons with the crisis of 1929 and the beginning of the Thirties.
The Art Déco is not just a way to design and create objects, decorations, places, architecture, but it’s a taste, a behaviour, a language that, betraying its origin from the Austrian-German Secessions and the Avanguards of the beginning of the Twentieth century overviews, overwhelmingly emerges after the war and controls its own creative parabola and its own reasons with the crisis of 1929 and the beginning of the Thirties.
The catalogue tells and illustrates backgrounds, themes, iconography of the Déco in Italy, with some refers to International Déco, through four hundred artworks with sculptures, decorative art objects, paintings, decorations of important Italian artists that created and spread out the Italian taste in the world, doing the groundwork of the future Italian Design and the “Made in Italy”. From Gio Ponti to Guido Andlovitz, from Francesco to Carlo Rizzarda, from Mario Cavaglieri to Luigi Bonazza, from Adolfo Wildt to Libero Andreotti and Arturo Martini. The Déco is glamour, charm, mechanic rhythm, fleeting line, it’s the unlimited research of the living pleasure. The imagery of a world, or a part of that, that tried to free itself from the merciless banality of the everyday life, to forget the war experience, releasing and exalting its own economic and social role, identifying beauty with luxury, elegance and lifestyle, forgetting – more or less consciously- to dance on the edge of a vulcan.