 show consisted of 88 paintings (nearly half were attributed to Memling) and a subsidiary exhibition comprising textiles, manuscripts, and goldwork from this period. Aside from Memling’s works, there were copies of lost works and works by his predecessors, followers, and contemporaries. The Louvre, Paris, also held a show celebrating Memling’s quincentenary, with an exhibition drawn from French museums and pieces loaned from Italian and Dutch collections.
An exhibition focusing on 16th-century French drawings from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris was shown there and later at both the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show featured glasswork, silver work, and examples of decorative architectural projects. Though the emphasis of the show was on the school of Fontainebleau, there were many works by little-known artists, including some exquisite miniatures. Architectural drawings also were well represented.
An exhibition, "The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968," at the Guggenheim Museum was devoted to Italian art after World War II. More than 1,000 items drawn from this seminal era of Italian art and covering an important period in Italian history included objects related to photography, crafts, fashion, and film. Parallels were drawn between the works of such filmmakers as Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica and images created in the other arts, including the designs of both Fiat, the Italian automobile manufacturer, and architect Gio Ponti.
The exhibition also noted, through the work of such artists as Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, the important influence of the Futurism movement, which emphasized the power of the machine and the restlessness of modern life in general. The show highlighted the inventive and sometimes experimental use in both painting and sculpture of such everyday material as industrial-waste products and wire mesh.
The paintings and sculptures of the period, somewhat unusually, were probably less well-known, particularly outside Italy, than the designs and fashions. A notable aspect of the exhibition, which was also seen in Milan and Wolfsburg, Germany, was the way in which the duality of Italian modern art was expressed in its modern form, frequently relying on images from past artistic history, events, myths, or recollections.
The main summer exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was devoted to the history of the Wedgwood factory and the English stoneware produced by Josiah Wedgwood and his colleagues. The show, "The Genius of Wedgwood," commemorated the 200th anniversary of his death and included important items on loan from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, notably dinner pieces from the Frog Service, which was made for Catherine the Great. It was only the second time (the other was in 1909) that the Frog Service had been shown in England since it was commissioned in 1773. The wares in the exhibition were limited to those produced by Wedgwood’s factory before his death in 1795.
The bicentenary of Wedgwood’s death also was marked by an exhibition at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, England. "Josiah Wedgwood: The Man and his Mark" featured 195 pieces of Wedgwood drawn from public and private collections as well as works by Wedgwood’s competitors and contemporaries. In Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria displayed "Three Centuries of Wedgwood."
The marking of 100 years of trade between Japan and Brazil was recognized in an exhibition at the Fuji Art Museum in Tokyo. The show consisted of a collection of paintings on loan from the Museum of Art in São Paolo, Brazil, and included works by El Greco, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and Vincent van Gogh.
In Ljubljana, Slovenia, a large show, which opened in three separate venues in May, gathered the important examples of Gothic art from 1250 to 1450. Paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts were shown in the National Art Gallery, the minor arts were housed in the National Museum, and conservation techniques and materials and architecture appear