Raccontare il miracolo italiano nel 1994. The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968

Abstract

In 1994, The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968 opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York presenting, in addition to artworks, design, fashion and cinema fixed in the American collective imagination as typically Italian, even evoking clichés about Italian style. The objects, the chronological span and the curatorial discourses were functional to an American narrative and resumed choices and formulas used since the post-war period to promote Italian products in the United States. This article intends to give an account of the exhibition and its feedbacks, contextualising it and hypothesizing the reasons for recalling narratives from almost fifty years earlier, in 1994.