The case of Modigliani Art Experience

The Modigliani Art Experience was held at MUDEC Museum in Milan from 20 June to 4 November 2018. Founded in 2014, MUDEC is a museum dedicated to interdisciplinary research of the cultures of the world and focuses on the relationship of these cultures within the landscape of Milan. MUDEC aims to acknowledge the impact and presence of foreign communities in Milan and describes itself as a meeting place for cultures and communities. MUDEC can count on a building in the design district of Milan which houses 17,000 square meters of space for the collection, exhibitions, and various educational and community activities. In addition to its unique function and role within the dense network of Milanese museums, MUDEC has a unique governance structure with both public and private management between the Milan City Council and 24 ORE Cultura (MUDEC, 2019). Milan City Council is responsible for the management, preservation, and promotion of cultural assets as well as supervision of Forum of Cultures activities, while 24 ORE Cultura is responsible for the organization of exhibitions and additional services. This museum is an interesting context because, being relatively recent, the museum managers have been struggling to define a specific identity for the brand given its hybrid nature (both public and private).

The Modigliani Art Experience is an example of how digital technologies are used to enhance the museum experience. It is the second exhibition of this kind hosted at MUDEC; the first was the Klimt Arts Experience that saw a record number of 103.181 visitors. The experiential exhibition incorporates most of the digital technologies seen in large-scale contemporary art museums:

“Modigliani Art Experience” is a fascinating narrative, represented through images, music, sounds and suggestions that will recreate in front of the visitor the universe of Amedeo Modigliani painter and sculptor, allowing the projection in the Parisienne context where Modi -the tragic artist by definition -was a main character.

(MUDEC, 2018)

Research context and methodology

The Modigliani Art Experience was not a site-specific exhibition (based on the Immersive Exhibitions’ categorization presented), but it included some original Modigliani artworks. The Modigliani Art Experience is a traveling exhibition of the renowned artist with an interesting but troubled life, whose works were influenced by the social and historical context in Italy and in France. Being a fully digital experiential exhibition, it was selected as the research context as it represents an opportunity to investigate the experience lived by visitors in such settings and the state of immersion they experienced.

The exhibition adopted a multisensory approach to accompany visitors in their journey of discovery of Modigliani’s artistic style: the influence that Primitivism, African, Egyptian, and Cycladic sculpture is combined with the artist’s Bohemian life. The multimedia approach and immersive feel of the MUDEC exhibition were enhanced by the two rooms bookending the visit.

The entrance room displayed masterpieces of 20th-century African art from the MUDEC collection alongside three Modigliani portraits from the Museo del Novecento di Milano, enabling visitors to make a direct comparison between the works and to appreciate the influence that these models of Primitivism had on the genius’s work. The exhibition ended with an Infinity room where visitors were confronted with some of the artist’s most iconic works appearing in a continuous play of refractions and splintered images alongside a more classic account of the artist’s life and the historical, social, and cultural context in which he produced his work.

The research had the aim of understanding of participants subjective experience during the exhibition and was based on the analysis of their introspective reports in agreement with Richardson (1999), “although agreeing that we can never know anything about a subjective experience as such, it is possible to search for an intermediate solution by arguing that we can at least study the reports that are made” (p. 470). Although close to the category that Wallendorf and Brucks (1993) described as “guided introspection,” this type of retrospective introspection differs in that the subject’s report is compiled in the absence of a researcher. The reports were based on a preparatory phase, during which the participants were asked to attend the exhibition and pay attention to their feelings, emotions, and thoughts during their experience, then write down an introspective report, free in length and open-ended, within a couple of days of the visit and send it via email to the authors.

The study involved ten people: three of the authors of this chapter, students attending a course at Bocconi University or participating in a program delivered by SDA Bocconi School of Management, who were invited to attend the exhibition on a voluntary basis. The age range of the participants was between 22 and 58 years. All participants were already familiar with Modigliani and had attended at least one traditional exhibition of the artist in their life. The merger of horizons recommended by Thompson for the reports’ interpretation (1997) was facilitated by the three researchers involved, who followed an auto-ethnographic approach, which according to Reed-Danahay (1997) can reduce the gap between the text and the text’s interpretation framework.

A thematic and structural inter-textual and an intra-textual analysis was conducted on the introspective reports, in order to assess the process of immersion and the role of various digital stimuli offered during the exhibition. We identified the realization of a state of immersion through a textual breakdown based on the presence of verbs and verbal locutions making explicit reference to feelings of pleasure and enjoyment of the exhibition and claims which show an individual’s escape from his/her current environment as a result of specific emotions and feelings. In this context, we attempted to identify which kind of situations and stimuli were more important to achieve a state of immersion.