Yeah, so, I don't know, shall we start?
Yeah, let's start. Let's start at the start.
I'd wish I'd be at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome,
but I am of course not.
I wish I were there too.
So, instead, could we pretend and you can give me a walk through?
Yeah, we'll pretend
with Google Street View, and see what comes out of it.
It starts smack when you basically arrive
at the place itself.
As you can see, this is very much
a 19th-century kind of... sort of a wedding cake,
sort of concoction.
It has something going on everywhere.
And as you walk into this place,
what you notice
is that it actually
has these lions hanging out in front of it.
These lions of course are created contemporarily.
They're by an Italian artist, Davide Rivalta.
The lions in front of the Galleria I think are perfect
because of this historian differentiation
between the contemporary and the 19th century.
And as we go inside
we will see that this is basically happening all the time
in this museum.
What the director, Cristiana Collu, did,
and she did this better
than anybody else in the world,
is to completely mix it all up.
What we're looking at here
is really one of the major rooms.
And let's...
You see a gigantic sculpture
in the very centre of it.
And this is obviously a 19th-century sculpture
by a guy called Antonio Canova,
who really was the single most famous artist
of his time.
And what you have here, of course, up front,
is a sculpture of Hercules,
I think being extremely nasty to a messenger, to Lichas.
If we were there live,
you would be extremely aware
of the unbelievable motion
Canova is able to get out of that giant block of stone.
I mean, just look at how
the super, super thin fabric
is able to go down in front of his six-pack there.
It's a pretty amazing piece of art.
And it is placed smack in front
of this arte povera piece by Penone.
This piece that we see here is made out of thorns.
I think it's thorns from the acacia tree.
But you can see the way he arranged them on the canvas,
all these tiny little dots are pretty big.
I would say almost an inch high thorns.
And then he has that little piece
of gold leaf
in the centre of it,
almost like a procession.
I think you can read many things into there.
For me this looks very much like a mountain range
or like a valley within a wooded mountain range.
It's...
I would say it's pretty damn gorgeous.
In the context of the gallery
you really have that as the sort of landscape
in which that figure of Hercules stands.
It's really...
- It's powerful visually. - Yes.
You know, she has set the scene.
And there's even a lake in front of them.
I mean, this is really truly genius.
To place this 19th-century Canova piece
in front of another arte povera artist, where it reflects,
it's almost like a reflecting pool in this whole thing,
I think it's just genius.
So I'd say, let's move on, no?
Let's say, if we go
to this room here,
where we see a Giacometti sculpture.
This is one of his Venice women, placed here.
And look how she hangs it in front of this Morandi.
Now this is clearly a formal combination.
You have these very thin forms in the Morandi still life
and then you have this very thin form
of the Giacometti in front of it.
Giacometti really left these fingerprints instead.
And I think that he made these women out of plaster.
They were later, you know, cast in bronze,
but he made them out of plaster.
And it was sort of, like, to show that there is
never-ending possibilities of form,
Morandi really being almost opposite,
because he super, super carefully selected his...
selected his pieces,
sometimes taking days
to select the bottles or the cases
of the colour of the background
or of the tablecloth
that he would place his assemblage on.
I love that contrast between the two.
Yeah, it's, I think, formally extremely strong,
extremely similar,
even though they arrived at this similar form
in a very, very dissimilar kind of way.
I always love encountering a Giacometti in the gallery
because I always feel it's a real presence in the room with me.
It's like, all of sudden: "Oh, right! I'm a body! I'm here too!"
Yeah, absolutely.
So we go to the next sort of, like,
bigger room.
Now, if we start with the big landscape.
That is Giacomo Balla.
And it's basically...
Like he, later on,
made this very typical futurism.
He was one of the central futurist painters,
that basically celebrated speed
and, you know, saw speed itself as a new kind of form.
So here you could say: "Oh, placing the bicycle wheel in front of it
"has some sort of relationship to that park."
But then, of course, what we see here
is a Marcel Duchamp piece,
one of his most famous pieces,
one of the early readymades,
surely one of the single most influential pieces
of early 20th-century art of all.
When he first tried to exhibit these pieces,
everybody hated them so much,
and nobody basically paid any attention,
and they were thrown out.
I know that his toilet, it's called Fountain, from 1917,
I think was photographed by Stieglitz,
and Stieglitz just disposed of it afterwards,
basically just threw it out.
Actually, looking at these galleries in the Google viewer,
it's actually really nice to be in there alone,
without other people,
because you can see these conversations
between the art works so clearly, I think.
If it were crowded
and if you were negotiating each piece
and looking at them piece by piece,
it would be harder to think about those relationships.
Exactly.
So we want to move onwards.
So we are now
in another very, very large room, as you can see.
And this is a room that actually does have a subject.
This is a thematic room.
It's a room about war.
We see two gigantic...
sort of, like, 19th-century war paintings.
Both of them, of course, are real, proper war paintings,
like, you know, they've been commissioned
as a memory of war.
And once it was combined
with these fighting dogs over here...
They're quite realistic, they're extremely...
When you're there, when you see them in the flesh,
they're extremely aggressive,
meaning that even though they are clearly bronze sculptures,
they make you feel uncomfortable.
And then you have an abstraction here,
made out of plastic.
And this is a piece by Burri,
maybe the most famous of all the arte povera artists.
I think this piece really is made out of various parts of plastic,
sort of, like, burnt.
And there is an incredible aggression
in this place, in this piece again.
And then,
if we go quickly out
into a space...
So this is the veranda, an adjoining room
on one side of the war room that we've just been in.
And even though...
we still are in a room of abstraction,
the mood changes totally.
It changes because you have all windows,
so it's a lot of natural light coming in.
But also suddenly it becomes much more...
technical,
more brainy,
less emotional...
It's a brilliant installation of the collection,
and I really appreciate how much,
especially in this last... in the veranda room,
how the architecture is so much a part of the conversation.
If you go there,
I can basically guarantee that you're going to be blown away.
That's great.
Thank you so much
for giving me a walk through this remarkable museum and exhibition.
I really appreciate it.
It was a true pleasure. Really easy.