WILLIAM KLEIN ROME PLINIO DE MARTIIS

The exhibition, in Pavilion 9a, showcases an unprecedented juxtaposition between William Klein, a world famous photographer who died only very recently, and Plinio De Martiis, a legendary Roman art gallery owner with whose superb work as a photographer the public is still largely unfamiliar.

The exhibition explores aspects of Rome in the 1950s with a particular focus on its suburbs, seen through the eyes of two photographers, both – each in his own way – extremely sensitive to the human condition.

The walls of the exhibition hall are hung with more than 60 photographs in black and white, all of them devoted to the city of Rome. Willam Klein’s photographs are a representative selection from his celebrated book Rome + Klein published with a text by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1959 and now reissued by Contrasto in a new and expanded version edited by Klein himself before he died. The pictures are the product of an intense moment in Rome in 1956 when, as a young and as yet inexperienced artist, he trailed around the city in the footsteps of Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and their friends. Klein saw the ancient monuments, spent his Sundays in Ostia and became aware of the housing crisis and the suburbs that were then starting to sprawl. In his pictures we can feel the amazement of a young American discovering a fabulous yet complex city while at the same time discovering his own talent and his potential for becoming a great photographer in his own right.

Plinio De Martiis was a young yet experienced intellectual bent on imparting a political significance to his work along the lines indicated by Antonio Gramsci. The Rome he chose to photograph between 1951 and 1953 was the Rome of the humblest trades, of the wretched hovels in the city’s histoic centre and of the shanty towns in its suburbs. He was the first to travel that far out to document the way people lived. The beauty of his photographs lies in their total absence of rhetoric or of ideological veils. On the contrary, we perceive the photographer’s presence beside his figures, portrayed in shots that required no editing for them to be perfect.

The presence of texts by Pasolini in Klein’s book and the gaze, devoid of all condescending compassion, that De Martiis casts on the down-and-outs link this event to the Pier Paolo Pasolini. Everything Is Sacred. The Body Poetic exhibition currently running at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, part of a larger exhibition shared with the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica and the MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo.

The exhibitions on Pasolini, on Klein and De Martiis, and on Jonas Mekas in Pavilion 9b in the Mattatoio (Jonas Mekas 100! Images Are Real, 9 November 2022 – 26 February 2023), offer visitors a unique opportunity to explore three highly original and very different viewspoints of the generation to whom it fell to redefine the terms of civil coexistence in the postwar years.

William Klein (New York, 1926 – Paris, 2022), an artist, painter, photographer and film director, was one of the most innovative figures in international photography. From the ‘fifties onwards his visual work, collected in books that he himself designed, revolutionised our way of thinking, seeing and recounting the world. After New York, which he explored and portrayed in 1954 in a feverish and innovative diary that soon became a book (Life is Good and Good for You in New York, 1955), he shifted his focus to Rome, where he came to work as Fellini’s assistant on Le Notti di Cabiria. In the event the film was postponed but he took advantage of the delay to recount the city, which he explored from the centre to the suburbs in the company of such illustrious guides as Fellini, Moravia, Flaiano and Pasolini. The book was published by Feltrinelli in 1959 and has recently been reissued by Contrasto.
 

Plinio De Martiis (Giulianova, 1920 – Rome, 2004) founded the legendary Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome. The mythical demiurge of a cultural life that has gone down in history for the plurality and the vibrancy of its lifestyle, was a key player in Rome in the original years (his canny definition of the ‘fifties) and subsequently in the city’s Dolce Vita. The Tartaruga, a crucible of artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians, witnessed the beginnings of Schifano, Kounellis, Fioroni, Pascali and others, while Rauschenberg, Rothko and Kline showed there, Twombly was a regular presence, and the Il Teatro delle Mostre retrospective in May 1968 changed for ever the very manner in which an art exhibition was conceived. Before running a gallery, De Martiis had not only founded the Teatro dell’Arlecchino (which opened in 1946 with Flaiano’s Un marziano a Roma) but had been a professional photographer working with Vie Nuove, L’Unità, Noi Donne and Il Mondo. In 1951 he was one of the founder members of the Fotografi Associati cooperative, an important experiment that significantly helped to define the importance of the role of the image in Italian culture. 
 
 

The section of the exhibition devoted to William Klein is curated by Alessandra Mauro. The exhibits were selected in close cooperation with William Klein himself and with his studio.
The section of the exhibition devoted to Plinio De Martiis is curated by Daniela Lancioni, All photographs are the property of the Fondazione Antonio Gramsci, to which they were donated by De Martiis’ heirs.
 
 

In collaboration with