Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Italy
Carlo Cardazzo: A New Vision for Art

The distinctive component of Cardazzo's new vision of art was his precocious realization of the importance of networking and collaboration that would mark the art world of the future. On 25 April 1942, on the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice, he inaugurated the celebrated Galleria del Cavallino, in the same year that Peggy Guggenheim opened her New York museum-gallery Art of This Century. In 1946, he opened the Galleria del Naviglio in the center of Milan, initiating a series of relations with critics and intellectuals, travelling constantly between Europe and the USA, bringing together artists of different generations as well as avant-garde architects, and printing outstanding publications that projected the image of his persona to the wider public. He was the first dealer to contract Lucio Fontana, after Fontana's return from Argentina, and it was for the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan that Fontana conceived his Spatial Ambience with Black Light.

Carlo Cardazzo: A New Vision for Art recaptures the creative verve of Cardazzo's career. The first section reconstructs his personal collection in the 1930s and 40s. This was considered at the time among the major collections of 20th century art in Italy, with masterworks by Marino Marini, Giorgio de Chirico, Scipione, Mario Sironi and Massimo Campigli. Following this, documentation illustrates Cardazzo's special relationship with architect Carlo Scarpa, whom he commissioned to design, at the height of the war, his Galleria del Cavallino, as well as a second Venetian gallery in the Frezzeria, and the Pavilion of the Book for the Biennale Gardens. A room is given over to the Edizioni del Cavallino which he founded in 1935: titles such as James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Jarry, the Comte de Lautréamont: books, photographs, graphics, multiples as well as editions of ceramic sculpture with which he set out to launch Albisola as a center of art production. Carlo Cardazzo. A New Vision for Art brings to light a treasure trove of masterpieces, documents, objects, printed matter and manuscripts, much of it unpublished.