Postwar Italian Art History Today brings fresh critical consideration to the parameters and impact of Italian art and visual culture studies of the past several decades. Taking its cue from the thirty-year anniversary of curator Germano Celant's landmark exhibition at PS1 in New York – The Knot – this volume presents innovative case studies and emphasizes new methodologies deployed in the study of postwar Italian art as a means to evaluate the current state of the field. Included are fifteen essays that each examine, from a different viewpoint, the issues, concerns, and questions driving postwar Italian art history. The editors and contributors call for a systematic reconsideration of the artistic origins of postwar Italian art, the terminology that is used to describe the work produced, and key personalities and institutions that promoted and supported the development and marketing of this art in Italy and abroad.

Focusing on artwork by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting, especially the monochrome, broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in postwar Italy. Mansoor refuses to read the singularly striking formal and procedural violence of Fontana's slit canvasses, Burri's burnt and exploded plastics, and Manzoni's "achromes" as metaphors of traumatic memories of World War II. Rather, she locates the motivation for this violence in the history of the medium of painting and in the economic history of postwar Italy. Reconfiguring the relationship between politics and aesthetics, Mansoor illuminates how the monochrome's reemergence reflected Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni's aesthetic and political critique of the Marshall Plan's economic warfare and growing American hegemony. It also anticipated the struggles in Italy's factories, classrooms, and streets that gave rise to Autonomia in the 1960s. Marshall Plan Modernism refigures our understanding of modernist painting as a project about labor and the geopolitics of postwar reconstruction during the Italian Miracle.

A renowned art critic of the 1960s, Carla Lonzi abandoned the art world in 1970 to found Rivolta Femminile, a pioneering feminist collective in Italy. Rather than separating the art world luminary from the activist, however, this book looks at the two together. It demonstrates that even as Lonzi refused art, she articulated how feminist spaces and communities drew strength from creativity. The eleven essays in this book document the artistic and feminist circles of postwar Italy, a time characterised both by radical protest and avant-garde aesthetics, using primary and archival sources never before translated into English. They map Lonzi's deep connections to the influential Italian Arte Povera movement, and explore her complicated relationship with female artists of the time, such as Carla Accardi and Suzanne Santoro. Carla Lonzi's written work and activism represents a crucial, but previously overlooked, feminist intervention in traditional art history from beyond the Anglo-American canon. This book is a timely and urgent addition to our understanding of radical politics, separatist feminism and art criticism in the postwar period.

How spectacular visions of physical suffering in post–World War II Italian neorealist films redefined moviegoing as a form of political action

The first English-language monograph on Il Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, this study explores the rise and fall of this postwar Italian artists' group as a representative instance of the tensions facing Italian painting during the transition out of two decades of Fascism and into the global divisions of the Cold War. Adrian Duran argues that the binary structures of the era - realism vs. abstraction, Communism vs. democracy, conformism vs. freedom - have monopolized the discourse surrounding the Fronte Nuovo and, with it, the historiography of Italian painting during this period, 1944-50. Beginning with the dialogues that framed the formation of the Fronte Nuovo, this book reconsiders artists' works, correspondence, critical writings, and manifestos. These are married to examinations of specific exhibitions, the most important of which are the group's 1947 inaugural exhibition and the 1948 and 1950 Venice Biennali. The critical responses to these exhibitions are reconsidered in light of their groundings in the heated political debates of the period. In total, these diverse sources reveal the vast divide between the internal discourse of the arts, generated by the participant artists and their works, and the surrounding politics of Cold War Italy.

The first English-language monograph on Il Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, this study explores the rise and fall of this postwar Italian artists' group as a representative instance of the tensions facing Italian painting during the transition out of two decades of Fascism and into the global divisions of the Cold War. Adrian Duran argues that the binary structures of the era - realism vs. abstraction, Communism vs. democracy, conformism vs. freedom - have monopolized the discourse surrounding the Fronte Nuovo and, with it, the historiography of Italian painting during this period, 1944-50. Beginning with the dialogues that framed the formation of the Fronte Nuovo, this book reconsiders artists' works, correspondence, critical writings, and manifestos. These are married to examinations of specific exhibitions, the most important of which are the group's 1947 inaugural exhibition and the 1948 and 1950 Venice Biennali. The critical responses to these exhibitions are reconsidered in light of their groundings in the heated political debates of the period. In total, these diverse sources reveal the vast divide between the internal discourse of the arts, generated by the participant artists and their works, and the surrounding politics of Cold War Italy.