This Friday at the Royal and Town Center and June 7 at the Laemmle Glendale we’ll be opening Amei Wallach’s fascinating new documentary about the 1964 Venice Biennale Taking Venice, which, according to Alissa Wilkinson of the New York Times, “feels almost like science fiction, or maybe fantasy. Imagine the U.S. government taking such a keen interest in the fine arts that there may or may not have been an attempt to rig a major international prize for an American artist. A painter, no less!”
Ms. Wallach will participate in a Q&A at the Royal after the 7:20pm screening this Friday.
Last month the Times published an advance piece about Taking Venice by Nina Siegal headlined “Did America Cheat to Win the 1964 Venice Biennale? A new documentary takes a hard look at the persistent rumors around Robert Rauschenberg’s win in Venice in the midst of the Cold War.” Here’s an excerpt:
Did a conspiracy by U.S. State Department officials and art dealers secure a prize for painting for Robert Rauschenberg at the Venice Biennale in 1964?
Unconfirmed rumors of some sort of nefarious plot to that effect swirled in international art circles for years.
The documentary filmmaker Amei Wallach had heard them, and she was curious to know if they held any truth.
“This moment is a kind of urban legend in the art world,” said Wallach in a telephone interview from her home in New York on Long Island. “It was a flashpoint. The story goes: The Biennale had been a Eurocentric party, and this was the first time an outsider broke the code.”
Using archival footage and interviews with important figures involved in the 1964 Biennale, Wallach, the longtime chief art critic for Newsday and an occasional contributor to The New York Times, tried to unravel the mystery, exploring the charged political atmosphere that engendered those persistent claims.
The result is Zeitgeist Films’ Taking Venice, which will have its theatrical release next month in New York and Los Angeles.
The film revisits the Biennale and recreates the scene in which Rauschenberg’s artworks were brought through the Grand Canal by boat to get to the U.S. Pavilion in the Giardini, just in time to qualify for the award.
It also includes shots of the American art delegation flying into Venice in a U.S. military cargo plane filled with monumental Pop Art, and the opening party at the U.S. Consulate.
Wallach interviewed the leader of the 1964 Biennale team, Alice Denney, a Washington insider, who worked with the curator Alan Solomon and the art dealer Leo Castelli to bring Rauschenberg to victory.
“We didn’t cheat,” Denney said in the film, while conceding that a United States agency established to promote American dominance during the Cold War organized the art exhibition with an explicitly political agenda, to ensure that the show would reflect the United States well on the global stage. “We thought with Rauschenberg we had a very good chance.”
“One of the intriguing subplots of the Biennale all through the decades, more than a century, is how art and politics overlap,” said Philip Rylands, former director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, in the film. “There’s a kind of high altitude moment with the American presence in 1964. It reverberates through history.”
Click here to read the full piece.