Il gesto: Global Art and Italian Gesture Painting in the 1950s

Gaetano Salvemini Colloquium in Italian History and Culture, 2024

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This issue of CIS will investigate how art mediated corporate identity in Italian culture across the grand arc of history from the Middle Ages to the present. It seeks in particular studies of works of art that are associated with families, organizations, institutions, cities, social classes, or religious or secular groups or that functioned in discourse, debate, polemic and propaganda. Among the issues to be addressed are how works came to be associated with groups and ideologies; how they provided a fixed focus or catalyst for corporate behavior, values and pride; how the display and significance of the works changed over time; and how these changes were connected with (or disconnected from) the groups that they symbolized.

This study is based on an interactionist perspective, which conceives the art world as a social system. According to this view, the art world involves an interconnected group of actors, who share common interests and are embedded in a network of social relations. The aim of the essay is to offer an overview of the activity of visual artists in the German Democratic Republic and to outline their cultural exchange with Italy. Since the 1950s this interchange between GDR and Italy was supported by several actors and institutions at various levels (micro, meso and macro).

Italian Studies

Historical Materialism, 2023

Italian Modern Art, 2020

This essay looks at modern Italian art circulating in the United States in the interwar period. Prior to the canonization of recent decades of Italy’s artistic scene through MoMA’s 1949 show Twentieth-Century Italian Art, the Carnegie International exhibitions of paintings in Pittsburgh were the premier stage in America for Italian artists seeking the spotlight. Moreover, the Italian government actively sought to promote its own positive image as a patron state in world fairs, and through art gallery exhibitions. Drawing mostly on primary sources, this essay explores how the identity of modern Italian art was negotiated in the critical discourses and in the interplay between Italian and American promoters. While in Italy much of the criticism boasted a self-assuring “untranslatable” character of national art through the centuries, and was obsessed by the chauvinistic ambition of regaining cultural primacy, especially against the French, the returns for those various artists and patrons who ventured to conquer the American art scene were meager. Rather than successfully affirming the modern Italian school, they remained largely entangled in a shadow zone, between the glaring prestige of French modernism and the glory of the old masters (paradoxically enough, the only Italian “retrospective” approved by MoMA before 1949). Some Italian modernists, such as Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico, and Massimo Campigli, continued to be perceived as French, while the inherent duality and ambiguity in the critical discourse undergirding the Novecento and the more expressionist younger generation – which struggled to conflate Italianism and modernity, traditionalism and vanguardism – made the marketing of an Italian school more difficult. Therefore, despite some temporary critical success and sales, for example for Felice Carena, Ferruccio Ferrazzi, and Felice Casorati, the language of the Italian Novecento was largely “lost in translation.”

Carte Italiane

Nineteen sixty-eight has long been heralded as a, if not the, pivotal moment of the post-World War II decades. Following the assassinations of Malcolm X and both Kennedys, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the war in Vietnam, the first manned space flights, the Second Vatican Council and the invasion of technology throughout Europe, that single year was perhaps the most powerful and techtonic paradigm shift of the many that the decade already had witnessed. The student uprisings in Paris, the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact troops all exacerbated what had been a markedly violent period, quelling the optimism that had marked much of the decade and setting the tone for the coming malaise of the 1970s.

Republics and Empires: Italian and American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840-1970, 2021

In a key scene from Robert Aldrich's 1955 American science-fiction drama Kiss Me Deadly, right before the grand finale, the private detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) breaks into a commercial art gallery, the fictional Mist's Gallery of Modern Art in Los Angeles. He is looking for information about a complicated case involving multiple murders and an enigmatic box, the contents of which are said to be precious and dangerous. Hammer wants to interrogate the gallery owner, William Mist, whose apartment is located above the exhibition. It's night and Hammer walks furtively through the dimly lit galleries. His gaze (hence ours) focuses on the art on display, slowly moving through a room filled with works by Marino Marini, Afro Basaldella, Giorgio Morandi, Franco Gentilini, and Massimo Campigli (Figure 12.1). Hammer is so absorbed by the act of looking that he bumps into a coffee table, and the noise alerts the art dealer, Mr Mist, who frantically swallows a mouthful of sleeping pills to avoid the detective's interrogation. The plot of Kiss Me Deadly had nothing to do with contemporary Italian art, so why did Aldrich choose an exhibit of Italian modernism for his movie? How was modern Italian art perceived by the American public at the time? Did the Italians play an active role in this story? Aldrich's movie was part of a larger phenomenon involving the emerging interest in and market for contemporary Italian art in the United States, a cultural trend that helped change the perception of Italy in the 1950s. During the first decade after World War II, known as the Reconstruction period, Italy appeared to the world as an impoverished and devastated country. But starting in the mid-1950s, as the national economy expanded and a large portion of the country transformed into a consumer society, a new façade emerged-the so-called 'new Italy'-which signalled a modern glamour and international sophistication. Contemporary art, I will argue, played a crucial role in shaping and changing Italy's international image beyond the art world. During the first half of the 1950s, the fortunes of contemporary Italian artists improved significantly in the United States. In 1949, MoMA curators Alfred H. Barr, Jr and James Thrall Soby organised the first postwar show dedicated to twentieth-century Italian art. They regarded Italian modernism as unjustly overshadowed by contemporary French art on the one hand and Italian antiquity on the other. 1 12

Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States from Futurism to Arte Povera: "Like a Giant Screen", Routledge, 2022

This volume explores how Italian institutions, dealers, critics, and artists constructed a modern national identity for Italy by exporting-literally and figuratively-contemporary art to the United States in key moments between 1929 and 1969. From artist Fortunato Depero opening his Futurist House in New York City to critic Germano Celant launching Arte Povera in the United States, Raffaele Bedarida examines the thick web of individuals and cultural environments beyond the two more canonical movements that shaped this project. By interrogating standard narratives of Italian Fascist propaganda on the one hand and American Cold War imperialism on the other, this book establishes a more nuanced transnational approach. The central thesis is that, beyond the immediate aims of political propaganda and conquering a new market for Italian art, these art exhibitions, publications, and the critical discourse aimed at American audiences all reflected back on their makers: they forced and helped Italians define their own modernity in relation to the world's new dominant cultural and economic power. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, social history, exhibition history, and Italian studies.

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