The art of diplomacy

Italy's avant-garde Farnesina Collection indicates the relevance of contemporary art as a talking point.

A month-and-a-half before the scheduled visit of Italy's President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to India, the minister of foreign affairs Gianfranco Fini and the director general of New Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art, Rajeev Lochan, ably supported by India's ambassador to Italy, Himachal Som, signed documents that would result in 50 works from the Farnesina Collection making their way to the museum for a path-breaking exhibition of avant-garde art.

Today, as Lochan ambles through the museum, he has reason to be smug. For, in galleries that mirror the rooms where 40 Italian artists are being showcased, he'schosen the opportunity to show off his museum's recent acquisitions.

India's young artists may still be making their name in the global market, but here they're at par with their Italian counterparts, or at least that's the message Lochan is hoping will go out.

But the Farnesina exhibition is important on two counts. The first, because it belongs to the Italian ministry of foreign affairs. It is unlikely Indian diplomats would have an interest in art; certainly, they would be woefully lacking in appreciation for contemporary art.

Their Italian counterparts, on the other hand, are proud "" as Italian foreign minister Gainfranco Fini writes "" "to bring contemporary Italian art to the attention of foreign audiences.

The collection confirms the creative vitality of of our artists and the relevance of their works."

Interestingly, the Farnesina Collection covers Italy's greatest period of artistic churn after the Renaissance, a period from the fifties to the seventies, "20 years that represent a period of recovery and reconstruction after World War II", says Fini.

For those not familiar with anything other than classical works, the names that pop up frequently throughout this period include Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana who represent the phase when Italian art turned experimental with works that spanned from minimalism to conceptualism.

While many Italian painters were contemporaries of Picasso and influenced by him, the stranglehold of abstractionism was broken by Burri who moved the canvas into a physical realm with a dense consistency, using materials as different as tar and vinyl to create works of tortured surfaces.

He was to become one of the most important Western artists of the period along with Fontana for whom the concept of space and its articulation "" often in metal canvases "" was a hallmark that became a dominant Italian voice.

Burri and Fontana are represented among the 40 artists at the exhibition, many of them now well-recognised on the international marquee.

What's relevant is what Lochan refers to as the "close link between Italian art and Italian design".

It's represented in the canvases of Eugenio Carmi, Carla Accardi, Mario de Luigi, Piero Dorazio and Achille Perilli, but comes through equally in the mixed media works and textured surfaces of Enrico Castellani, Getulio Alviani and Salvatore Scarpitta.

Others such as Bice Lazzari, or Afro, says Lochan, remind him of "works by Brecht".

The Farnesina Collection may move to Mumbai from Delhi when it is brought down after March 6, but if ambassador Himachal Som can swing it so that the NGMA's collection of recent acquisitions is shown in Rome and Milan, he would have done more to boost contemporary Indian art than almost anyone else recently.

And then, India's ministry of external affairs can take a leaf from Italy's ministry of foreign affairs to re-evaluate the relevance of contemporary and not just traditional art as a tool of diplomacy.