Title: Art, industrial design, science and popular culture : modernism and cross-disciplinarity in Italy and Great Britain, 1948-1963
Abstract:Conceived inside a chronological frame, which starts in 1948,
the year the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London founded,
and ends in 1963, when Gillo Dorfles wrote a crucial essay on
industrial...Conceived inside a chronological frame, which starts in 1948,
the year the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London founded,
and ends in 1963, when Gillo Dorfles wrote a crucial essay on
industrial design, concluding more than a decade of
discussions, the thesis aims to examine some artistic and
cultural phenomena identified in Italy and Great Britain, and
seen as the acknowledgement or as the reaction to modernity.
Topics and fields taken in consideration within the thesis are
technology, science (fact and fiction), vision of the future, the
relationship between arts and the awareness of industrial
design as a new discipline. All these aspects, that might seems
unusual in relationship with visual arts, are perceived as the
expression of a second phase of Modernism.
The British personalities included in the thesis are Reyner
Banham, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale,
Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson, all members of
the Independent Group. With the presence of architects, visual
artists, photographers, critics and, in a broader sense,
designers, the group encompassed a variety of popular
interests, with the inclusion of mass‐produced goods. The
Italian figures presented in the thesis – Gillo Dorfles, Bruno
Munari, Ettore Sottsass and Giuseppe Pinot‐Gallizio – focused
on industrial design objects, viewed as a new artistic branch, to
promote, to plan or to question. Other recurring figures
analysed in the thesis are Max Bill, Asger Jorn and Tomas
Maldonado, who give international connections to the themes
and British and Italian personalities examined.
In order to provide a wider understanding of the 1950s and
their crucial function in the story of post‐war Europe, the thesis
aims to emphasise the role played at different level by British
and Italian visual artists, designers and critics, and explain the
reasons that, in the following decade, would push Italy in its
industrial miracle and Great Britain at the peak for its popular
culture, pop music and fashion creativity.Read More
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-10-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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