Looking at Zagreb: The Italian State as a Popularizer of Contemporary Art

In 1965, at the 12th International Conference of Critics, Artists and Art Scholars, held in Rimini, Verucchio and San Marino and devoted to the theme Art and Technology, Italian art critic Giulio Carlo Argan declared that Yugoslavia had overcome the problem of the relationship between art and technology. His statement concerned to the cultural milieu of Zagreb that Argan had known from the early Sixties. In the same year, Palma Bucarelli, the chief curator of the Rome National Gallery, attended the Brezovica conference held for Nova tendencija 3, to present a project in which the museum had a significant role as a state institution that had to encourage contemporary art in order to free artists from the pressures of the art market and private art galleries. In 1963, another art scholar, Umbro Apollonio, the curator of the Venice Biennale Archive for Contemporary Arts who had directly participated in the Venice exhibition Nuova tendenza 2, claimed that Italian Public Art School needed a new relationship between teaching and industries. My presentation aims to highlight how Argan, Bucarelli, Apollonio and other Italian scholars hoped for the state to intervene in the Italian art system and also how their ideas were inspired by the Croatian political and cultural situation of the 1960s