Ugo Mulas

In one of the most extensive exhibitions to date of Ugo Mulas’s work, over three hundred photographs chronicle, with great clarity, three decades of the artist’s presence in Italy and then the United States. Documenting the art scene from the 1950s to the ’70s, Mulas’s oeuvre embodies the shift from modern to contemporary art. The exhibited body of work switches its focus from reportage to new photographic languages, ending with the series “Verifiche,” 1970–72, an empirical verification—through repeated images of varying exposure, for instance—of the skills Mulas had acquired from instruction and didactic manuals twenty years earlier. In the experiments in “Verifiche,” photography interrogates itself; if lacking the purity of much early Conceptual photography, the series is still an early example of the radical research surrounding it. Mulas captured revealing moments in art history through his love of the artist as persona, even more than through his interest in art itself. By entering directly into the fray, he depicted the interaction of artists as an exuberant—sometimes carnivalesque—collective celebration, rather than a closed, self-referential debate. From this pioneering practice comes the exhibition’s title, “La scena dell’arte” (The Art Scene), referring also to Mulas’s successful book, New York: The New Art Scene (1967). That volume was created after he discovered the work of Cy Twombly—as well as the oeuvres of Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and John Chamberlain—at the 1964 Venice Biennale, a revelation that led Mulas to New York and to document an extraordinary moment in art history.