MoMA’s International Program and the exhibition “The Modern Movement in Italy: Architecture and Design”, 1954-1958.

The paper considers the theme of postwar cultural exchange between Italy and the United States through the means of itinerant artistic exhibitions, focusing specifically on The Modern Movement in Italy: Architecture and Design, a traveling architecture show organized by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1954. The event opened a new season of foreign art exhibitions organized for the American public under the auspices of MoMA’s International Program, a Museum enterprise that in 1952 expanded the Museum’s well-established Department of Circulating Exhibitions. The Program designed shows for both American and international institutions: it exported a sophisticated representation of the US abroad, meanwhile importing the most advanced foreign cultural accomplishments. After the exhibition The Modern Movement in Italy: Architecture and Design opened in New York, it traveled extensively until 1958 to museums and universities throughout the United States and Canada. The exhibit provided a detailed survey of the Italian architectural and design production from the 1920s to the immediate post-war years, relying on original materials such as photographic enlargements and text which its curator, Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013), had assembled expressly for the show while on a Fulbright Fellowship in Italy. The paper retraces the ideation, the contents and the critical fortune of the show by discussing the process behind the construction of the exhibition, examining the operations, rhetorics and reasons that led to its synthesis and selection of both architects and projects. This study aims at investigating in what ways the institution, the Program and the exhibit itself contributed to shaping and circulating specific narratives of interwar Italian architecture in the North-American context throughout the 1950s, interpreting the exhibition’s role within the larger panorama of cultural, commercial, and education events that were promoting representations of Italy to the American public, and problematizing established ideas such as that of the postwar Italian Renaissance. The paper is based on research carried out on multiple sources: MoMA’s archives, the Huxtable Papers at the Getty Research Institute, disciplinary publications, and the press.