Center for Italian Modern Art
Apr 20, 2022
Think of her as Peggy Guggenheim in reverse. Laura Mattioli Rossi: an Italian, not an American, living in New York, not Venice, near Canal Street, not the Grand Canal. She established and runs a private foundation in New York, the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA), which recalls the private, one-woman Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Since 2013, Mattioli has exhibited Italian art of the Interwar and Postwar period in the SoHo loft building on Broome Street where she also lives. Guggenheim displayed Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists of the same period in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, where she lived. The two heiresses, raised by nannies some 50 years apart, also shared lonely childhoods.
Her father’s extensive collection of Italian Futurist art began in 1949, a birth date just before her own, 1950. “When the collection was born, I was born,” she said last month. “The collection was my big, more successful sister — famous and more beautiful, and more pleasing to my father.”
Read the New York Times article online or here as a PDF