Magazzino Museum

On a snowy day last week my friend Anne and I visited Magazzino, the new Post War Italian Art Museum in Cold Spring, NY (about an hour drive from Salisbury).  Considering that we both live in the area, we were late checking it out. The art world cognoscenti  have been making trips since it opened last summer, proclaiming it “totally surprising,” “divine,” and “an amazing gift to the area.”  

The collection is primarily “Arte Povera,” a term I’d never heard and had to look up. According to the Tate in London, it is “a radical Italian art movement from the late 1960s to 1970s whose artists explored a range of unconventional processes and nontraditional ‘everyday’ materials.” Would it be comprehensible?

Magazzino is housed in a former factory which has been done over so that stepping inside, you feel like you’re entering a Greek temple of concrete, cement and glass.  The founders of this space, Nancy Olnick and Georgio Spanu, created it to show their collection which is housed in eight gallery rooms which sit in a semi-circle formation on one floor. There is no crowding here - each room contains about five pieces.  But -- warning: This is not easy art.  It is Italian for sure, but there are no Renaissance  paintings of bosomy women holding cute naked babies, nor are there even the oft-reproduced Modiglianis or Morandis we so often connect with Modern Italian art. In fact, there are no paintings at all. The collection could be described as assemblages – like one piece: a grouping of old oil lamps,  books and blankets which poignantly suggests refugees hiding out during World War II. Near it was the taxidermied head of a six-point buck attached by a string to neon numbers laying out the Fibonacci sequence. Though the sequence is often seen as a spiral, these blue neon numbers are strung out like a lofty clothesline – the unspooling of science perhaps? It seemed to look at the brutality and direction of the human mind.  In another room, long marble columns have been placed on their sides and splotched with gold paint.

Why exactly – who knows? There are no little cards explaining the intent of the artists, no titles or names of the artist on the works, and definitely no headphones so you can walk around and be told what to think. Each piece asks you for your own thoughts. Some are beautiful, many sad, others provocative, and still others maddeningly head-scratching.  “Do you think that big, white wooden base is art or did somebody move the statue?” I ask Anne. “I think you are supposed to dance ‘The Pony’ on it,” she says. Our lovely guide, Victoria Jones, is more eloquent when she says that perhaps it would be more powerful in a darkend room so that we could see that the point is to glow from below. We tried to imagine all of that but in the end it was a dirty white painted slab on the floor that kind of got in the way.

Maybe.  This is a museum that you can return to many times and never quite feel like you have really understood it – so go soon because it is beautiful and sorrowful and funny, and makes you think.

Magazzino Italian Art 2700 U.S. 9, Cold Spring, N.Y. Free admission. Call for an appointment to visit. 845-666-7202