L’Approdo on Television and Contemporary Art

Abstract

From 1963 to 1972 Rai broadcasts, first on Programma Nazionale (Channel I), then on Secondo Programma (Channel II), the cultural program L’Approdo. Settimanale di Lettere e Arti, originally born for the radio (1945-1977) and as a literary journal published by ERI (1952-1954; 1958-1977), with a board of directors that included, among others, Roberto Longhi, Riccardo Bacchelli, Emilio Cecchi, Giuseppe Ungaretti. L’Approdo for the television was part of a lasting and broad cultural project, for which some of the most authoritative intellectuals of the national scene dealt with the new possibilities to narrate and spread offered by TV. Although the focus of the program was the literary field, visual arts played a fundamental role: the paper reflects on this last aspect, with the goal to analyse the cultural policy of the broadcast with concern to contemporary art, in the light of the educational mission of Italian television in the '60s. Thanks to the systematic consultation of the Teche Rai Multimedia Catalogue, the paper examines the artists, the tendencies, and the exhibitions dealt with by the program. It analyses the models and genres through which L’Approdo addressed and disseminated art of the 20th century, translating it into the specific languages of television, for an audience which was wider and more diverse than the usual actors and observers of the art system. L’Approdo for the television is a particularly significant case study, on the one hand, because the program is itself a useful source for the historiography of art, on the other, because its analysis allows to measure the distance between the historical and critical relevance and the success on television of artists, issues, and tendencies of contemporaneity.

Keywords

• “l’approdo”
• televisione
• arte contemporanea
• rai
• xx secolo