ABSTRACT
In June 1949, barely two months after Italy entered the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York (Fig. 3.1). 1 It included Italian paintings and sculptures from Futurism to postwar abstraction and was accompanied by a richly illustrated 144-page catalog. 2 Widely publicized as the first survey of modern Italian art in America, it was also MoMA's first post–World War II show to focus on a single European nation. 3 The next one to be mounted, almost a decade later in 1957, featured the art of the other former enemy nation with a similarly straightforward title: German Art of the Twentieth Century. The two exhibitions, however, could not have been more different. Organized 12 years after the defeat of the Axis powers, with West Germany's rehabilitation well under way, German Art of the Twentieth Century was curated by German art historians and paid for by the Government of the German Federal Republic. Understandably, no art formerly accepted or exhibited in Nazi Germany was included. 4 By contrast, Twentieth-Century Italian Art was prepared and held in the immediate postwar moment; it received little help from the Italian Government; and the art was selected by two leading figures of MoMA: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and James Thrall Soby. 5 The starkest difference lay in the content: the majority of the artworks included in the Italian show were pieces that had been supported and widely exhibited under the Fascist regime.
