VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

In 1950, Caterina Marcenaro, the new director of Genoa’s civic art collections, collaborated with Italian architect Franco Albini to reimagine the interior spaces of the Palazzo Bianco in an unprecedentedly modern fashion after the museum’s building suffered extensive wartime damage. This partnership was an answer to the government’s haste in having the museum reoccupy its historic footprint, even using its 16th century floorplan to achieve full reconstruction. In this presentation, I examine the dichotomy of clashing past and present co-located in this single urban site at the heart of one of Italy’s richest cultural centers. I argue that this bold approach to curatorial practice demonstrates a strongly modernist answer to the status quo of the prewar museum model, especially its facilities and exhibitionary potential. Rather than leaning into the government’s desire to immediately restore Genoa’s legacy architecture to a historical moment greatly disconnected from the recent Second World War, Marcenaro and Albini’s “museum criterion” experiment utilized interior exhibition spaces, new emphasis on the individual visitor, and industrial building materials in fine arts settings to propose a landmark shift in museography and exhibitionary practices moving forward – despite the Palazzo’s outward appearances. Scholars of art and museum history have greatly preferred to discuss postwar museum narratives centered on restoration, with emphasis on looted or returned collections rather than the physical spaces as their main agenda. My presentation instead aims to expand such existing discourse by bringing this understudied yet significant take on modern curatorial practice embedded into historical reconstruction to the fore.