Vellum Paper for Pastry

The Anonymous Design on display at Fondazione Cirulli

Among the 19 exhibition sections that make up the current exhibition at Fondazione Cirulli “The Animated Archive. Work in Progress” – currently temporarily closed due to lockdown – it is undoubtedly Anonymous Design. Parchment Papers for Pastry that has sparked the most curiosity and garnered the most interest from our visitors.

This section features a selection of parchment papers for pastry from the 1930s. It is certainly unusual to see this type of material  displayed within a museum space with the same dignity as a work of art. The disruptive element takes center stage; the visual impact is also striking, the result of careful curatorial work: the pastry papers are mounted on black grids arranged in a seemingly random manner, giving the visitor the impression of walking through an unusual colored forest .. This leads to curiosity and amazement from the visitor: beautiful material, without a doubt, but: why in a museum?

In this regard, it is important to contextualize  the material to outline the historical and cultural elements that led to its creation. In 1915, at the height of Futurism, a group of artists led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti signed the famous manifesto Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, in which they presented a project for the transformation of society that also included a significant change in the role of the artist. “The art of the future will be powerfully advertising,” wrote Fortunato Depero in the manifesto ‘Futurism and Advertising Art‘ published in 1931 in the Unique Futurist Campari Issue. 

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The Futurist artist is ready to get hands-on, to work in the advertising industry, to photograph buildings and airplanes, to design wallpapers and covers for books and magazines. As a result, an entire generation of artists begins to actively participate in the economic life of the country, distancing themselves from the art for art’s sake of decadent origins in favor of atotal art. The cultural legacy of this operation is precisely what we now call Made in Italy, a collection of skills not only artistic but also artisanal and industrial, that have their roots in this historical phase, from which the heritage of material culture derives.

Diulgheroff, like his contemporaries, worked to survive between avant-garde workshops and commercial ones (in industry, advertising) fostering those happy intersections that determined the experience of modernity in industrialized Italian society.

The exhibition at the Fondazione Cirulli “The Animated Archive. Works in Progress”, created with the consultancy of Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Metalab @ Harvard), with its 19 exhibition sections tells this two-faced aspect of 20th-century Italian art through the display of unusual materials. The exhibition becomes a true laboratory of history and culture of the century of modernity par excellence, the 1900s, the period in which Italian creativity as we know it today is born and develops, through a kaleidoscopic exhibition that ranges from the visual arts to industrial design, from advertising to cinema, from photography to television, from fabrics to magazines, and, of course, the delightful pastry papers.