Living with style

An exhibition at Rovereto's MART is not subject to the logic of today's "fast" production in the museum and gallery world: as a challenge to the visitor, it reconsiders the artistic and intellectual world of the first half of the 20th century, gravitating around figures such as Ezra Pound and the Bloomsbury Group.

"Living with style, or in the style of" — in 2005, Domus previewed a declaration of intent that already outlined the profile of the new show at Rovereto's MART, Another time. Between the Decadent movement and Modern style, curated by Lea Vergine.

Deliberately outdated, this exhibition is not subject to the logic of today's "fast" production in the museum and gallery world. Its content — the artistic and intellectual world of the first half of the 20th century, gravitating around such prominent figures as Vanessa and Virginia Stephen (later Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf), the Bloomsbury circle, Ezra Pound and the Sitwell brothers — is a challenge for the visitor. And while it does allow for "immediate" consumption (with such high-quality pieces as sculptures by Gaudier-Brzeska, drawings by the Vorticists, and various graphic eye-candy), the exhibition is a "time-release" event raising exquisitely pressing, topical questions that the visitor can explore further in the extremely well-documented catalogue, published by Il Saggiatore.

In their content and form, the different stimuli are closely related. The first question regards what to display. What form can be given to an exhibition in which the works themselves are the relationships between actors dedicated mainly to a total project of the self?

In the case of Edith Sitwell, the biting, audacious poet and writer who knew how to make herself into a living icon — immortalized in photos by Cecil Beaton and portrayed by Bloomsbury painters — the exhibit displays two of the "five rings with pale blue stones as large as metro tickets" (in the words of Alberto Arbasino) that Dame Edith, in theatrical attire, would proffer for a kiss. (Today's costume design can also find several interesting ideas here). Not surprisingly, Sitwell is portrayed as a tutelary deity, or rather, a hostess welcoming and taking leave from visitors to the exhibition, whose path unravels like a home — at times a promiscuous one — to the many protagonists.

Top: Cecil Beaton
<em>Edith Sitwell. Multiple exposure</em>, 1962. Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s. Above: <em>Un altro tempo. Tra Decadentismo e Modern style</em> ["Another time. Between the Decadent movement and Modern style"], installation view at the MART Rovereto — Top: Cecil Beaton *Edith Sitwell. Multiple exposure*, 1962. Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s. Above: *Un altro tempo. Tra Decadentismo e Modern style* ["Another time. Between the Decadent movement and Modern style"], installation view at the MART Rovereto

Italian stylist Antonio Marras' exhibition design is based this a "simple and strong" idea: the home. In his own collections, Marras creates cultivated sets focused on the reinterpretation of memory. Here he uses a light hand to evoke the domestic intimacy in which the events recalled by the show can unfold. A portal of overlapping armoires, alluding to assemblages by contemporary artists like Michael Johansson, welcomes the visitor. A corridor then leads to a sequence of rooms, each painted from floor to ceiling in a different vintage colour. Vintage door jambs, mouldings, doors, and doorknobs define the setting in which various pieces of furniture — dissolved by the overwhelming use of colour and deprived of their original functions — serve as supports for the objects displayed. Deploying an interior design vocabulary, the exhibition design underscores one of the show's merits, which is its focus on this fragment of the Anglo-Saxon world between the wars, re-considered as a momentous turning point in the concept of life-style — in the modern sense of the term.

Ezra Pound, <em>How to Read</em> — Ezra Pound, *How to Read*

If in public our players are bearers of modernity — in terms of taste, think of Roger Fry as the "promoter" of Matisse and Picasso or, in terms of ideas, the antimilitarism shared by the entire Bloomsbury Group —, in private they tend toward a domestic condition that is appropriate for the times and its ideas.

First, modernity means comfort. Virginia Woolf used the royalties from her first works to bring light, water and heating to her home in Charleston. Modernity also means imagining alternative styles of domestic life. The five floors in the Bloomsbury house — plus the attic for the servants — were the theatre for experimenting a very sui generis collective lifestyle. Arbasino has described how several visiting groups of friends constantly exchanged ideas about the world while "without apparent effort, they faced and resolved such issues as the management of the body, learning to live together, mutual involvement, and total libertine sexual versatility without false problems..."

The first question regards what to display. What form can be given to an exhibition in which the works themselves are the relationships between actors dedicated mainly to a total project of the self?

<em>Un altro tempo. Tra Decadentismo e Modern style</em> ["Another time. Between the Decadent movement and Modern style"], installation view at the MART Rovereto — *Un altro tempo. Tra Decadentismo e Modern style* ["Another time. Between the Decadent movement and Modern style"], installation view at the MART Rovereto

Modernity also means understanding the home as the place where subjectivity unfolds. The reference to Freud is obvious in the exhibition's intricate allusions. Who is not familiar with A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf? Woolf's writings repeatedly stress that the home is "a kind of shell that our person has secreted (...) to have a form of its own different from others", and that "it seems certain that writers leave a mark on their things more indelibly than other people. They may have no artistic taste, but they always seem to have a far more rare and interesting gift — the faculty to live in an appropriate manner by making a table, a chair, curtains, carpet in their own image."

Dora Carrington,
<em>Lytton Strachey</em>, 1916.
National Portrait Gallery, London — Dora Carrington, *Lytton Strachey*, 1916. National Portrait Gallery, London

This is very different from the situation stigmatized by Walter Benjamin; he attributes the alienation of interior design to the schism between work and living space transformed into pure representation. In that world, objects are completely devoid of their use value.

Alvin Langdon Coburn,
<em>Vortograph of Ezra Pound,</em> 1917.
George Eastman House, Rochester — Alvin Langdon Coburn, *Vortograph of Ezra Pound,* 1917. George Eastman House, Rochester

Because the exhibition concerns artists and intellectuals, this problem does not arise here. For the most part, they live and work in the same space. (Which begs the question — and today?). In that space, these artists and intellectuals do not disregard the value of the use of things. Ezra Pound built the furniture in all of his homes — as well the interiors of Shakespeare & Co. bookstore — with his own hands. These were most likely done with few artistic ambitions, but with the pride of a job well done and the culture of a carpenter. "He writes like a man who could make a good piece of mahogany furniture", he would say as a compliment. Raffaella Poletti

Through 13 January 2013
Un altro tempo. Tra Decadentismo e Modern style ["Another time. Between the Decadent movement and Modern style"]
MART Rovereto
Corso Bettini, 43, Rovereto

Living with style

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