New York! New York! tells the tale of a group of leading Italian artists who fell in love with the Big Apple in the first decades of the 20th century and whose passion for all things American swept them up in the process of the gradual globalisation of the art market and the world in general.
The exhibition shows roughly 150 works, divided between two locations in a complementary path.

The exhibition in the Museo del Novecento illustrates America and, in particular, the intense relationships with New York city as seen by Italian artists, with works by Lucio Fontana, Giorgio De Chirico, Fortunato Depero, Gastone Novelli, Toti Scialoja, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Mimmo Rotella, Tano Festa and Ugo Mulas among others. New York looms large as a theme, a sort of leitmotiv envisaged in several different styles representing Italian art in the first half of the 20th century.

The exhibition in Gallerie d’Italia, in Piazza della Scala, illustrates the artists’ reconstruction of relationships with the institutions, the galleries and the American collectors who promoted Italian artists and their art in the USA. From the XX Century Italian Art exhibition, held in 1949 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, are exhibited masterpieces by Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, and then on to works by artists from the Fifties and Sixties, among them Carla Accardi, Afro, Gianfranco Baruchello, Enrico Baj, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Renato Guttuso, Lucio Fontana, Pino Pascali, Achille Perilli, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Mimmo Rotella, Giuseppe Santomaso, Mario Schifano, Francesco Somaini, Toti Scialoja and Emilio Vedova.

The exhibitions also highlight the teaching role Italian artists assumed in American universities, the dialogue between sculpture and the Big Apple, the relationship between Rome and New York, up until the impact of a nascent Pop Art on Italian artists.