P420 presents a selection of 14 paintings from the collection of the Museum of American Art (MoAA) of Berlin (opening on Saturday 21 September at 18.00, P.zza dei Martiri 5/2, Bologna, already on view from Thursday 19 September in coordina- tion with the opening of Artelibro).

The paintings, in acrylic on canvas by an unknown artist, represent the covers of the catalogues published for the exhibitions of American art organized at MoMA New York by the curator Dorothy Miller. From the early 1940s until the early 1960s Dorothy Miller introduced, for the first time in the programming of the MoMA a large number of American artists through a series of exhibitions such as 14 Americans (1946), 12 Americans (1952), 12 Americans (1956) and Americans 1963 (1963). Thanks to the International Program for the circulation of the exhibitions devel- oped by MoMA, also with private support, one of the most famous shows organized by Dorothy Miller, The New American Painting (1958-59), toured museums in eight different European countries, leading to a radical shift in knowledge and perception of the American art scene in Europe, and consolidating the formulation proposed by Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller as the only possible History of Modern Art. The catalogues of those exhibitions, symbolizing a precise exegetic program, through the showing of the paintings that represent the individual events, become an exhibition in their own right, triggering a process of reflection on the dynamics of the History of Modern Art and on the very concept of Art itself.

The Museum of American Art of Berlin is an educational institution dedicated to assembling, preserving and exhibiting memories on the Museum of Modern Art in New York and its exhibitions of American art shown in Europe during the 50es. Those exhibitions helped establishing the post-war common European cultural identity based on individualism, modernism and internationalism.