"Ma l'America è lontana". A proposito della nascita del Modern Art Museum di New York (1929)

The opening of MoMA in 1929 in New York marks a crucial moment, because it introduces a new idea about value and use of collections and proposes a new exhibition policy, welcoming the risk and the change into the protected space of the museum. From the beginning, the MoMA became a dominant model, showing a critical thinking that joined the defence of modernism and the success of formalism; its clear expression will be the museum display. The originality of this essay is the analysis of the repercussions of the opening of MoMA in Italy, reviewing newspapers and magazines of those years. In our country the attention for MoMA – with the exception of the Old Master exhibition in 1939 in the American museum – started with the exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art (1949), that produced only marginally a wider reflection on happened transformation of the museum and of its functions