The spiral in Milan
The Museo del Novocento arches from the underground to the cathedral in space, and from the Roman era to the present in time
MúzeumCafé 24.
A 140-metre-long spiral ramp leads from the depth of the underground up to the sky, or at least to the height of the Duomo’s spires. It’s quite easy to reach Milan’s new, sensational museum building from any part of the city, since there is a direct connection with the metro system. In all likelihood the Museo del Novocento, will draw lots of people who are not particularly interested in the Italian and international art of the twentieth century but are seeking beauty in a general sense, since the museum’s windows open to the Duomo and its square. That might explain the more than 200,000 visitors in the first months after opening. Nevertheless, the popularity of the new museum is primarily due to its collection containing several masterpieces of 20th-century Italian art, spanning from Futurism and Metaphysical painting through the works of the Novecento Movement to Lucio Fontana’s perforated canvasses, from Burri’s material paintings to Piero Manzoni’s can with the words Merda d’artista. It’s as if on the top level of the Torre dell’Arengario the curators only wanted to see whether contemporary art could cope with the comparison of the suggestive façade of the Duomo – 15 paintings, ceramics and ‘spatial concepts’ with two principal compositions Struttura al neon from 1951 and Soffitto spaziale made in 1956. The former was created from a 100-metre-long neon tube bent by hand for the staircase of the 9th Milan Triennial – as Fontana described it, “the beginning of a new expression”. The second large-scale mural work was made for the dining hall of the Hotel Golf on the island of Elba. The artist not only designed it, he himself also created it with the help of local bricklayers.