Illustration and documentation vs. exhibitions and museums: a proposal for “Emporium”, an open building site

Abstract

Coming into being during the Art Nouveau flowering years and becoming its popularizing manifesto, the magazine Emporium made the illustration-word combination one of its distinctive features. Recognizing very often more useful to see a well-done figure than to read a long chapter, the “technical reproducibility” of the work of art was assumed as the privileged medium of visual communication, also didactic and didascalic, of artistic content, museography and critical debate. On the basis of the important studies on Emporium, the contribution aims to investigate, for the years 1945 to 1957, the renewed cut of the magazine around museums, restitution exhibitions and monographic exhibitions, as examples of a international debate on the new dimension of museum that, opened between the two wars, found accomplished field of application in the season of Italian and international museography of the second half of the twentieth century.