Shortlist - Works and Narratives
What's the most meaningful work out of the XX century?
What is the most iconic piece of art of the last Century? what's the work, the artists who affected the most you, your life, your perception? That's what we have asked our listeners and the answers are rather interesting: Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol are among the shortlisted, but what is truly noteworthy is the almost total absence of women - with the exception of Georgia O'Keefe and Laurie Anderson - of non European artists - Lucio Fontana is the only one crossing the western borders - of Italian artists. We asked the same questions to a few curators we had the chance to meet in Faenza at the Contemporay Art Festival.
The production is available in Italian with the exception of Iwona Blazwick's comment on Guernica.
Iwona Blazwick, director of Whitechapel Gallery in London talks about Guernica by Pablo Picasso and its still powerful impact on political and public consciousness.
Taking cue from The Nature of the Beast - a special project commissioned by the Whitechapel Gallery and trough which Polish artist Goshka Machuga brought Guernica back to the gallery in 2008 - Iwona Blazwick speaks about the symbolic value it has taken on, universally, as an antiwar warning and tells why it is such a powerfuly controversial image after all these years.
She also goes back to 1939 when Guernica was showcased at the Whitechapel gallery and on behalf of Picasso and of the local Communist Party, visitors were asked to donate a pair of boots to be sent to the Spanish anti Franco warriors. Almost four hundred pairs were gathered beneath the painting.
To understand how controversial Guernica is, in 2003 at the entrance of the U.N Security Council - where the tapestry copy of Guernica donated by Nelson Rockfeller is hung - when Colin Powell declared war on Irak it seemed it would be inappropriate to speak about war with the 20th century's most iconic protest against the inhumanity of war as his backdrop.
