Thrall Soby J., Barr Alfred H. XX Century Italian Art

New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1949. — 162 p.This book and the exhibition on which it is based have been planned as a general introduction to modern Italian art. The field is one that we in America have tended to neglect, not only because of our rightful interest in our own contemporary painting and sculpture, but also because of two formidable counter-attractions in Europe —the Parisian present and the Italian past.
But twentieth-century Italian art is well worth our attention. It has produced two movements— Futurism and the scuola metafisica —which have made vital contributions to the international mainstream of art in our time.
These two movements have been examined in some detail in the following pages. With more recent Italian developments our method has been less methodical. We have illustrated a wide but by no means comprehensive selection of art produced by leaders of the older and middle generations, men who have not been associated with the two movements just mentioned or who in later years have turned away from them. We have also included a group of artists who have attained national and occasionally international prominence chiefly during and since the recent war. There have been cases in which we have not been able to borrow abroad works which we had hoped to exhibit.