The Venice Biennale, now in its 60th edition, is officially the longest-running international art exhibition in the world, spanning 129 years. It came into being in 1895, long before the internet and decades before commercial airplane travel. The year it opened coincided with the first projected celluloid film.
In all that time, the Biennale has weathered seismic social shifts: the rise and fall of European fascism, the beginning and end of the Cold War, and countless other conflicts, as well as the advent of Futurism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.
During those moments of change, the Venice Biennale itself became a world stage for political upheaval. Here are some of its defining moments:
1895
After two years of planning by Mayor Riccardo Selvatico of Venice, the city celebrated the silver wedding anniversary of King Umberto and Queen Margherita with the 1st International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice, opened on April 30, 1895. It made use of the city’s public garden, the Giardini di Castello, created by Napoleon. Conceived as a showcase of new and recent international artists, it attracted more than 200,000 visitors, according to the Venice Biennale archives.
1907
Until 1907, a single central pavilion displayed art from various European countries. Belgium built the first independent national pavilion, to showcase its country’s work. After that, the British, Hungarian and Bavarian Pavilion, for Germany, were built in 1909; the French and Dutch in 1912; and the Russian in 1914. Other pavilions would come later.
1910
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, and a group of like-minded artists, dropped manifestoes from the top of the Campanile into the Piazza San Marco. The leaflet denounced the city’s old ways, proposed burning all the gondolas and destroying the crumbling palaces. This was the artists’ way of calling for an embrace of modernity and a radical avant-garde.
The action took place just before the exhibition of Futurist artworks in the Biennale, explained Debora Rossi, head of the organization’s archives, and was designed to generate publicity for a show by Umberto Boccioni. “Part of the idea of the movement was to provoke,” she said. “It was a performance.” Seen that way, it was the first work of political performance art ever to show at the Biennale.
1930s
While Benito Mussolini served as Italy’s prime minister, the Venice Biennale became a “political tool for the fascist government” and “a propaganda instrument,” said Cecilia Alemani, artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale and a co-curator of a 2020 exhibition of the event’s history.
Alemani explained that, under orders from the fascist government, the exhibition halls were filled with approved classical art and, finally, in 1942, with art explicitly “about military might.” About a year after becoming German chancellor, Hitler met Mussolini for the first time in June 1934, before visiting the 1934 Venice Biennale. They traveled together to the Giardini on the Grand Canal by boat, cheered by crowds on the bridges and banks. Hitler was photographed with other Italian leaders in the hall of the German Pavilion.
1948
After the Art Biennale was canceled from 1943 on because of the war, the first major postwar exhibition emphasized freedom of expression for artists. Pablo Picasso showed his work at the Biennale for the first time. The American art collector Peggy Guggenheim was invited to use the Greek pavilion (closed while the country was in a civil war) to show her collection of Cubism, Futurism, abstraction and Surrealism — forms of art that had been labeled “degenerate” by the Nazis, discarded or burned, while artists were persecuted.
Guggenheim also debuted a new form of art coming from the New York scene, including Robert Motherwell, Alexander Calder and early Jackson Pollock. “It was the beginning of the shift of the needle toward America,” Alemani said.
1964
Before 1964, the American pavilion was not run by the U.S. government, but by an artist cooperative, and then by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. At the height of the Cold War, State Department officials began to regard the Biennale in a new way, and the United States Information Agency, a government diplomatic agency, took control. Amei Wallach, the director of “Taking Venice,” a new documentary film about that 32nd Biennale, explained that officials saw the event as a potential platform on which to wage a “cultural Cold War” with the Soviet Union.
A delegation of American Pop artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, took the Biennale by storm, with the support of a team led by the Washington insider Alice Denney, the curator Alan Solomon and the art dealer Leo Castelli. Finding the American pavilion too small for its show, the team converted the disused U.S. Consulate in Venice into a gallery.
Rauschenberg won the grand prize for painting for his “combines” incorporating silk-screens featuring symbols of 1960s Americana — the first time an American had ever taken the prize. For many, it signaled not only the triumph of Pop Art, but also an idea that the center of the art world had shifted from Paris to New York, Wallach said.
1968
As student protests spread across Europe, the Biennale became a symbol of political and cultural struggle. Young Italians poured into Venice, marching in the streets and storming the gates of the Giardini. Opening day ended with a police crackdown against a demonstration on Piazza San Marco. Carrying signs that read, “The Biennale is Dead,” the protesters managed to occupy some national pavilions and turn the art to face the wall. Some artists withdrew their works to support the protests. The clash forced institutional reforms, including a 1973 revision of the Biennale’s underlying statutes, which had remained unchanged since Mussolini’s reign, Rossi said.
1974
The new president of the Biennale, Carlo Ripa di Meana, a socialist, opened the so-called “New Biennale,” designed to emphasize democratic politics and social change. In 1974, he kept the pavilions shuttered and devoted the show’s platform in public spaces to a single “antifascist” exhibition in response to the military coup by Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Entitled “Libertà al Cile” (“Freedom for Chile”), it included concerts, theatrical performances and street murals painted on-site. Ripa di Meana wrote that it was “an act of dutiful solidarity and democratic faith” with the Chilean people.
1977
The “Biennale of Dissent” highlighted artists from the Soviet Union and other Communist bloc countries, such as Czechoslovakia, showcasing Soviet art, theater and film made by dissidents at home and abroad.
The art exhibition, “New Art From the Soviet Union. an Unofficial Perspective,” featured some 300 works by 70 Soviet artists who were not sanctioned by the state, angering Soviet authorities, which pulled out of the Biennale for a few years.
1993
After the Cold War ended, the Biennale reflected a changed world. The German conceptual artist Hans Haacke created the installation piece “Failed Hope” by smashing the stone floor of his country’s pavilion, where Hitler had once stood, and leaving it in fragments. Alexander Alberro, a professor of art history at Barnard College and Columbia University, explained that the installation was one of several works that year that “dealt with the new world order in a number of ways. You could call it the first Biennale in a truly global context.”
1997
In the midst of wars in Yugoslavia, the Serbian artist Marina Abramovic presented “Balkan Baroque,” an installation in which she sat in a pile of animal bones in a white dress, crying and singing Balkan folk songs while trying to scrub the bones clean, as blood stained her dress. Since it was summer in Venice, the piece had a powerful stench, leaving a lasting impression on visitors.
2020-22
The Covid-19 pandemic postponed the 2020 Architectural Biennale for a year. While all national pavilions in the Giardini were closed in 2020, the central pavilion was devoted to one exhibition: “Le muses inquiete (The Disquieted Muses). When La Biennale di Venezia Meets History,” co-curated by Alemani, which used archival documents and art.
The 2021 edition of the Art Biennale was also postponed and took place in 2022. Alemani, its first Italian woman artistic director, curated the exhibition “The Milk of Dreams.” More than 80 percent of the works were by women and nonbinary artists. That event also marked another kind of opening up. Cameroon, Namibia, Nepal, Oman and Uganda participated for the first time.
2024
Because of the war in Ukraine, the Russian pavilion remains empty this year for a second time, while the Ukrainian pavilion is devoted to a collaborative artwork called “Net Making.”
In response to the Israel-Hamas war, an activist organization collected more than 23,000 signatures on a petition to ban Israel from this year’s edition. In a statement in February, Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, called the petition shameful and confirmed Israel’s participation in the event. On Tuesday, however, when the pavilions opened for a media preview, Israel’s remained locked. The artist and curators representing Israel said they would not open the show until “a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.”
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