On the occasion of the exhibition Picasso: Fifty Years Later organized by the Elmhurst Art Museum and marking the 50th Anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, we are pleased to present a lecture by Christine Poggi (Ph.D.), Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, who will discuss the relationship between Picasso and Italian vanguards, presenting her book In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage.
The artist Gino Severini, who resided 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 to be both shocking and a spur to further innovation, leading to subsequent visits to Paris that allowed the Futurists to develop their own distinctive goals and techniques. This talk explores the responses of artists Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, and Luigi Russolo to Cubism, and to the art of Picasso in particular. It also addresses the early polymaterial experiments of Giacomo Balla, who, like Picasso, began to employ a diversity of materials in both pictorial and sculptural works in the years leading to First World War.
This program is part of “Europe Without Borders,” the 2023 series promoted by EUNIC Chicago (European Union National Institutes of Culture).
Free with tickets to Picasso: Fifty Years Later. Buy Tickets
Christine Poggi is Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research has focused on the early 20th-century European avant-gardes, the invention of collage and constructed sculpture, the rise of abstraction, and the relationship of art to emerging forms of labor and technology. Her books include In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (Yale, 1992) and Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, 2008, awarded the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the MLA).