National and International Modernism in Italian Sculpture from 1935-1959.

modern sculpture;Italian sculpture;Fascism;Italian art;Cold War;Art History;Arts;History of Art

Gamble, Antje K.Zurier, Rebecca ;

University of Michigan

关键词: modern sculpture;    Italian sculpture;    Fascism;    Italian art;    Cold War;    Art History;    Arts;    History of Art;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/113651/akgamble_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

My dissertation crosses the divide between the inter-war and post-war periods in closely examining the sculptural production, exhibition, and critical reception from 1935 to 1959 of two Italian sculptors, Marino Marini (1901-1980) and Fausto Melotti (1901-1986). Since Italian culture has largely been segregated around the Second World War, a parentheses has been put around Fascist culture, largely because of the Regime;;s wartime connection to Nazism. Yet, both Marini and Melotti were productive before, during, and after WWII. This dissertation brings attention to how these sculptors;; wartime production can be seen as both relating to and moving away from their inter-war artworks. While many critics and scholars have praised Italian sculptors;; post-war production as a phoenix rising from the ashes of Fascism, my project posits that the beginnings of post-war vibrancy can be found during the war years. The intensification of totalitarian controls on culture resulting from both Mussolini’s empirical agenda and the Italo-German alliances of 1936 and 1939 led to a sense of urgency among many artists to make new work. This new post-Fascist work would be separate from their own earlier modernist works championed under early-Fascism. This paradigm shift in the mid-1930s did not result in a complete disavowal of their modernist projects however, but rather a continued challenging of the possibilities of sculptural modernism. Through an examination of the two case studies, Marini and Melotti, my dissertation provides a more dynamic understanding of modernist Italian sculpture across the Fascist divide. Correspondingly, my dissertation sheds light on the post-war Trans-Atlantic critical frameworks that were used to understand these sculptors;; modernist sculpture. These works;; exhibition and reception reveal critical connections to the debates of the early Cold War. For Melotti, a new sculptural modernism blurred the lines between art and consumerism, being understood as Italy;;s new robust democratic cultural labor in the aftermath of WWII. For Marini, his sculpture became embroiled within the Trans-Atlantic debates about Cold War ideals of modern sculpture, while at the same time being valued for its cultural cachet within American collections.