Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States from Futurism to Arte Povera
“Like a Giant Screen”
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.
Raffaele Bedarida is an Associate Professor of Art History at The Cooper Union, New York, where he directs the History and Theory of Art program.
Routledge Research in Art Museums and Exhibitions
Routledge Research in Art Museums and Exhibitions is a new series focusing on museums, collecting, and exhibitions from an art historical perspective. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed.
Art Museums of Latin America
Structuring Representation
Edited by Michele Greet and Gina McDaniel Tarver
The Twentieth Century German Art Exhibition
Answering Degenerate Art in 1930s London
Lucy Wasensteiner
Curatorial Challenges
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating
Edited by Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen and Anne Gregersen
Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire Museums of Design, Industry and the Applied Arts
Matthew Rampley, Markian Prokopovych, and Nóra Veszprémi
The Venice Biennale and the Asia-Pacific in the Global Art World
Stephen Naylor
A History of Aboriginal Art in the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Vanessa Russ
Contemporary Curating, Artistic Reference and Public Reception
Reconsidering Inclusion, Transparency and Mediation in Exhibition Making Practice
Stéphanie Bertrand
Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States from Futurism to Arte Povera “Like a Giant Screen”
Raffaele Bedarida
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Art-Museums-and-Exhibitions/book-series/RRAM
Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States from Futurism to Arte Povera
The right of Raffaele Bedarida to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-08129-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-10606-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21617-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003216179
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For Dafne my love and accomplice across the Atlantic
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Figures
1.1 Fortunato Depero and his wife, Rosetta, who holds a copy of the Bolted Book, on the rooftop of the Advertising Club in New York, 1930. MART, Rovereto. 13
1.2 Installation view, Exhibition of the Italian Book, ArnoldConstable & Co, New York, March 15–30, 1929, including Fortunato Depero, Depero Futurista (aka Bolted Book, 1927). MART, Rovereto. 14
1.3 Fortunato Depero, English exercise page, c. 1928–1930. Archivio del ‘900, Fondo Depero, MART, Rovereto.
1.4 Fortunato Depero, Skyscrapers and Tunnels, scenography for the proposed show, The New Babel (rejected), 1930, tempera on paper, 1930, 68 × 102 cm. MART, Rovereto.
1.5 Page from Depero’s essay, “Vertigini di Nuova York” published in L’illustrazione italiana, June 23, 1935. MART, Rovereto.
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1.6 Situating Depero’s book, Nelle opere e nella vita (1940). In the left circle are artists’ memoirs: Carlo Carrà, La mia vita [My life] (1943); Giorgio de Chirico, Memorie della mia vita [Memoirs of my life] (1945); and Gino Severini, Tutta la vita di un pittore [The entire life of a painter] (1946). In the right circle are the Americanist books: Margherita Sarfatti, L’America: ricerca della felicità [America: The pursuit of happiness] (1937); Emilio Cecchi, America amara [Bitter America] (1939); and Elio Vittorini, Americana (1942). In the intersection is Depero’s Americanist memoir Nelle opere e nella vita. 19
1.7 Fortunato Depero, I fari dell’avvenire: Bitter e Cordial Campari (The beacons of the future: Bitter and Cordial Campari), originally published in Numero unico futurista Campari (Milan: Campari, 1931): 51. MART, Rovereto. 20
1.8 Depero, Subway, Folla ai treni sotterranei (Subway, Crowd Going to the Underground Trains, 1930), originally published in Futurismo 1932 (Rovereto: Mercurio, 1932), 111. Futurism, Rome. 21
1.9 Fortunato Depero, Stato d’animo a New York (State of Mind in New York, 1930), a free-word plate, ink on pasteboard, 45 × 32 cm. MART, Rovereto. Translation from upper left to bottom right: “Show in Brooklyn/ project Wanamakers/Zucca’s quote/Roxy Theatre costumes/A-B-C of Italian Futurism/pay-collect-ins/istwrite-phone/discuss-endlessly/armor yourself/ multiply yourself/ssssssssss/trrrrrrrtrrrrrr/Chinese/Russian/French/Still/
English/Greek/German/watch/see/see everything/watch/aaaaaaaal wayssss winsurely-always-forward/absolute precision/always listen/ see, hear, answer, insist/don’t forget quick, quick, quick, solve/watch out the pirates, not a word, forward/watch out 10,000 carssssss/wait your turn-hold on/patience-patience-patience-patienc [sic]/long live Mussolini/long live Marinetti/flag of optimism/forward/forward/ self-beam of will/state of mind in New York.” 23
1.10 Fortunato Depero, Futuristic House (1928), business card. MART, Rovereto.
1.11 Fortunato Depero, Nove teste con cappello (Nine heads with hat, 1929–1930). Pieced wool on cotton backing, 46 × 48 cm. Fondation Mattioli Rossi, Geneva.
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1.12 Fortunato Depero: Futurist House (1929). Letterhead. MART, Rovereto. 26
1.13 Fortunato Depero: Vele, Santi ed Ali d’Italia (plastic diorama in Buxus), 1942 as reproduced in So I Think So I Paint (Rovereto: Mutilati e Invalidi, 1947). MART, Rovereto.
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2.1 “We are going to boycott the Fair,” postcard sent to the New York World’s Fair, June 12, 1940. NYWF Papers, New York Public Library. 38
2.2 Attilio Piccirilli relief for the Palazzo d’Italia, Rockefeller Center, New York, installed in 1935, destroyed in 1949. Rockefeller Center Archives, New York.
2.8 Michele Busiri Vici (architect), Italian Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1939. 52
2.9 Andrea Spadini, Etiopia, as reproduced in Exhibition of Italian Contemporary Art, Italian Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair, 1939, p. 11. Courtesy: Heirs Andrea Spadini. 53
2.10 Enrico Prampolini, Installation project, New York World’s Fair, 1939, Padiglione Italia, Futurist Room, tempera on board, 26 × 64 cm. 55
2.11 Corrado Cagli, La scoperta dell’America (The discovery of America), 1939, oil on panel, 92 × 150 cm. Archivio Corrado Cagli, Rome. 60
2.12 Mimì Pecci-Blunt (right) with the Italian Ambassador to Washington, Fulvio Suvich and his wife, Matilde Suvich at the opening of An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Painting, Comet Gallery, New York, December 10, 1937. Archivio Corrado Cagli, Rome. 67
3.2 Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Ignazio Gardella, installation design for the exhibition, Handicraft as a Fine Art in Italy, 1948, House of Italian Handicraft, New York, as published in Domus, 226 (January 1948): 33. Archivio del Politectico, Turin. 93
3.3 Installation view of the exhibition, Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today as installed in the Art Institute of Chicago, 1951. The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York. 94
3.8 Installation view of the exhibition, Twentieth-Century Italian Art, paintings by Morandi and sculpture by Modigliani, MoMA, 1949, Soichi Sunami (photographer). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
4.1 Film stills from Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich (director), 1955, featuring artworks by (from upper left to bottom right) Marino Marini, Afro Basaldella, Giorgio Morandi, Franco Gentilini, and Massimo Campigli. Courtesy: Adell Aldrich.
4.3 Installation view of Five Italian Painters, the inaugural exhibition of the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York, January 1950. Archivio Corrado Cagli, Rome.
4.4 Afro (Basaldella), Lest We Forget II, 1952–1953, oil on canvas, 40½ × 50 in. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Emily Genauer Gash in memory of her husband, Frederick Gash. Fondazione Afro, Rome.
4.5 Page spread from the exhibition catalog, Twenty Imaginary Views of the American Scene by Twenty Young Italian Artists (Rome: L’Obelisco, 1953). Reproduced: Caffè, Baseball; Canevari, Vermont; Caruso, Ice Cream Vendor in Brooklyn. Archivio L’Obelisco/ Archivio Irene Brin, Rome.
4.6 Page spread from the exhibition catalog, Twenty Imaginary Views of the American Scene by Twenty Young Italian Artists (Rome: L’Obelisco, 1953). Reproduced: Afro, Chicago; Enrico D’Assia, Somewhere in the West; Burri, Jazz. Archivio L’Obelisco/Archivio Irene Brin, Rome.
4.7 Harper’s Bazaar, June 1952, p. 74, fashion photographs by Richard Avedon, featuring the sculpture, Cavaliere by Marino Marini. Richard Avedon Foundation, New York.
4.8 Haper’s Bazaar, September 1955, p. 199, fashion photograph by Louise Dahl-Wolfe featuring installation view of Alberto Burri at the Stable Gallery, New York, May 23–June 18, 1955. Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.
4.9 Film still from Billy Wilder (director), Sabrina, 1954. In the scene: Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn) with Marino Marini’s sculpture, Piccolo Cavaliere (1948) in the background. AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo.
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125
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142
4.10 Film still from Billy Wilder (director), The Apartment, 1960. In the scene “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon) with Campigli’s painting, Le Mondariso (1958) in the background. Archivio Massimo Campigli, Rome.
5.1 Michelangelo Pistoletto as reproduced in John Ashbery, “Talking of Michelangelo,” Artnews, 65, 4 (Summer 1966): 42. Original caption: “Man With Cigarette, 1964, 79 inches high. The background reflects the Castelli Gallery and a Rauschenberg painting.” Archivio Pistoletto, Biella.
5.2 Installation view of the show, Nine at Castelli, Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York, 1968. In the foreground Giovanni Anselmo’s Senza titolo (untitled), 1968. Leo Castelli Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
5.3 Gilberto Zorio, Luci (Lights) as reproduced in Nine Young Artists: Theodoron Awards, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1969.
5.4 Installation view of the show, Young Italians (1968) as reproduced in the exhibition catalog. In the foreground, Pino Pascali, Confluences, 1967. In the background, left to right: Mario Ceroli, Untitled, 1967, and Getulio Alviani, Isometric Surface with Vibrating Texture, 1966. Jewish Museum Archives, New York.
5.6 Carla Accardi, Tenda (Tent), 1965–1966, varnish on sicofoil, plexiglas sheets, and structure, 888 × 90 inches, as reproduced in the Recent Italian Painting and Sculpture (New York: Jewish Museum, 1968).
5.8 Cover of Germano Celant, Art Povera (New York: Praeger, 1969). 180
5.9 Michelangelo Pistoletto in Germano Celant, Art Povera (New York: Praeger, 1969).
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5.10 Cover of Germano Celant, Arte Povera (Milan: Mazzotta, 1969). 183
Acknowledgments
The origins of this book go back almost 20 years, in 2003, when I first got to spend a semester in New York as an exchange student from the University of Siena, Italy to conduct research on the transatlantic artistic career of Jewish Italian exile, Corrado Cagli. On that occasion, I had the opportunity to take classes at the Institute of Fine Arts of NYU and the Graduate Center of CUNY and to meet some of the scholars and friends who have never stopped to inspire and challenge me. In 2006, when I started my PhD at the Graduate Center, I expanded on my Cagli project and embarked on this, broader study, which has become a space and a tool to process my own cultural translations and personal transformations, as I lived in the United States for the past 15 years. And since 2016, as a professor at Cooper Union, I had the privilege to to teach these materials and re-think about their relevance in Donald Trump’s America in conversation with with my brilliant students and colleagues. Therefore, my gratitude for the persons that I am going to name is motivated not only intellectually but also for being companions, support system, and community, all at once.
My thanks go first of all to Emily Braun who has provided me with uninterrupted guidance and support, firstly as my PhD advisor, then as a colleague and a friend. A meticulous reader and a patient listener, she has always proved an ideal interlocutor: challenging, sharp, and generous. Her role in this book has been profoundly impactful. A volcano of ideas and a frank critic, Romy Golan has been a point of reference and a source of inspiration for the past 15 years. Through their unique perspectives and deep knowledge, Antonella Pelizzari and Lucia Re have significantly helped me refine my ideas. I am grateful for their thoughtful and passionate responses to the manuscript.
My project benefited greatly from the archivists, librarians, and others who helped me find key documents and publications. I am especially grateful to Stefano Valeri, Archivio Lionello Venturi, Rome; Adachiara Zevi and Emanuela Termine, Fondazione Bruno Zevi, Rome; Claudia Palma, Archivio Bioiconografico e dei Fondi Storici, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; Giuseppa Saccaro del Buffa, Archivio Eugenio Battisti, Rome; Barbara Faedda, Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, New York; Elisabeth Thomas, MoMA Archives, New York; Federico Zanoner, Archivi Storici of MART, Rovereto; Marco Mattioli and Mara Righi, Fondazione Archivio Afro, Rome; Michelangelo Pistoletto and Marco Farano, Archivio Pistoletto, Biella; Laura Avedon and Erin Harris, The Richard Avedon Foundation, New York; Natalia Indrimi, Archivio dell’Obelisco/Archivio Irene Brin, Rome; Giovanni Rossi, Fondation Mattioli Rossi, Geneve; Christine
Acknowledgments
Roussel, Rockefeller Center Archives, New York; Giuseppe Briguglio, Archivio Corrado Cagli, Rome; Taylor Catalana, The Jewish Museum, New York; Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo, Rome; and Sergio Pace, Library, Archives and Museum of the Politecnico, Turin. A special thank is due to Milan Hughston, Jennifer Tobias, and the entire staff of the MoMA Library who hosted me so graciously in their beautiful spaces through the bulk of the writing process. Thanks to the individuals who kindly granted me or helped me receive image permissions: Adell Aldrich, Dafne Campigli, Elena Dellapiana, Monica Cardarelli, Joyce Faust, Fred Gross, and Alain Silver.
Innumerable conversations, discussions, and encounters have influenced and informed my project. In particular, I want to thank my friends and colleagues at the CUNY Graduate Center: Stephanie Jeanjean, Rosemary Ramsey, Lauren Kaplan, Andrew Cappetta, Media Farzin, Lindsay Caplan, Kerry Greaves, Joseph Alpar, and Nadine Helm. As a fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA), I found a stimulating environment of fruitful exchange and cooperation, especially with Fabio Belloni, Francesco Guzzetti, Laura Moure Cecchini, Flavio Fergonzi, Nicol Mocchi, Vivien Greene, Nicholas Fox-Weber, and Valentina Pero. A special thank goes to Heather Ewing for her warm support during and after my time at CIMA and for her invaluable comments on the manuscript; and, most of all, to Laura Mattioli, who made CIMA possible with her generosity and vision. During my sabbatical in Italy, I reconnected with or found a warm environment of colleagues and friends who helped me rethink and sharpen my ideas: Davide Lacagnina, Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, Carla Subrizi, Ilaria Schiaffini, Claudio Zambianchi, Stefano Chiodi, Laura Iamurri, Sergio Cortesini, Ester Coen, Maria Bremer, Davide Colombo, Giorgio Zanchetti, Silvia Bignami, and Paolo Rusconi. I would like to thank my colleagues at Cooper Union for being an incredible source of inspiration since I joined this unique institution in 2013: Peter Buckley, William Germano, Anne Griffin, Mary Steiber, Atina Grossmann, Brian Swann, Diego Malquori, Nada Ayad, Nana Adusei-Poku, Allison Leigh, Rose Ojo-Ajayi, Ninad Padit, Walid Raad, Doug Ashford, Dennis Adams, Leslie Hewitt, William Villalongo, Lucy Raven, Fia Backstrom, and Cristobal Lehyt. Other dear friends and sparkling minds have variously helped me with their brilliance: Steven Heller, Martha Schulman, Ruggero Montrasio, Jacopo Galimberti, Adrian Duran, Daniele Astrologo Abadal, Franco Baldasso, Nicola Lucchi, Ara Merjian, Sharon Hecker, Matteo Stagnoli, Susanna Pozzoli, Michele Matteini, Francesco Tumbiolo, Reuven Israel, and Mariagrazia Pontorno.
For their warm hospitality during my research travels, I extend my gratitude to Daniel and Amanda Stevens in Washington, DC; Tommaso and Sara Disegni in Milan; Gabriel El Zarrugh in Milan; Adolfo, Monica, and Paola Profumo in Genoa; Rivka Burstein in Rome; Nicola Campigli in Saint-Tropéz; Daniel Fitzpatrick in London; and Francesca Montrasio in Monza. My greatest appreciation goes to my grandparents Lea and Gastone Orefice and to my aunt Laura Orefice: their presence in New York, their hospitality, and support played a determinant role in my choice to move here in the first place. They made my life in New York easier and more pleasant. My deepest gratitude is for my parents Anna and Daniele, and my sister Laura, who have never stopped being a source of inspiration and encouragement. And most of all, I want to thank my wife Dafne with whom I have shared every facet of this transatlantic journey. I dedicate this book to her.
Acknowledgments
Research for this book was supported by generous grants: a five-year CUNY Graduate Center Chancellor Fellowship funded by Barbara Slifka, a CUNY Graduate Center Dissertation Fellowship, a Gulnar Bosch Travel Grant, a yearlong Center for Italian Modern Art Fellowship, a Terra Foundation for American Art conference and publication grant, a scholar-in-residence access privilege at the Bibliotheca Hertziana –Max Planck Institute of Art History in Rome, and a Visiting Professorship at the Università Statale in Milan. The completion of my manuscript was made possible by a sabbatical leave from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in New York. Cooper Union’s research funds covered some of the expenses for image copyright permissions. My most sincere appreciation goes to these individuals and institutions.
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Introduction
In 2014, as I was completing the dissertation that forms the basis of the present study, Italian art historian and collector Laura Mattioli opened the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York, an exhibition space and research hub established with the declared goal: “to promote public appreciation and advance the study of modern and contemporary Italian art in the United States and internationally.”1 The inaugural show, dedicated to Futurist artist Fortunato Depero, was conceived as a comeback, or, as CIMA put it: “the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work in New York since Depero’s residence in the city in the late 1920s.”2 CIMA, in other words, symbolically inaugurated its mission by evoking the 1929 Futurist House, founded by Depero in New York – namely, the first programmatic effort to promote Italian modernism in the United States-, while trying to make up for its failure at the same time (see Chapter 1). 3
Three years later, two collectors, Nancy Olnick from New York and Giorgio Spanu from Sardinia, Italy, founded Magazzino Italian Art, a 20,000 square-foot museum in Cold Spring, New York. The museum’s mission was (and still is) to “serve as an advocate for Italian artists as it celebrates the range of their creative practices from Arte Povera to the present.”4 By dedicating its permanent exhibit to Arte Povera, Olnick and Spanu chose this internationally successful movement as a gateway to contemporary Italian art, which they present as relevant yet overlooked in the United States. 5 Italian critic, Germano Celant’s 1969 operation to promote Arte Povera in America (see Chapter 5), still functions as a historical precedent and a strategic model for the advancement of contemporary Italian art internationally. Through art, Magazzino has the ambitious goal of “changing the image of Italy.”6
Although the relationship between the present volume and the two initiatives is more one of correlation and intersection than causation, many of the main motives behind CIMA and Magazzino as well as their operative modes are deeply rooted in the historical events and the cultural phenomena that I discuss in these pages: from the way privates feel the urge to complement or compensate for Italy’s weak institutional presence to the idea that Italian modernity fights a two-front battle for its international recognition – the weight of Italy’s past and the perceived irrelevance or provincialism of its present. The fact that a major effort of both CIMA and Magazzino is to encourage dialogue between scholars from the two sides of the Atlantic through fellowship programs, academic activities, and publications also responds to a perceived gap in how art history is practiced in Italy and in the United States: the interest in bridging that gap, while at the same time resisting the American
DOI: 10.4324/9781003216179-1
dominance of an increasingly globalized discourse, is also very much rooted in the historical initiatives and preoccupations explored in this book.
Does cultural exchange necessarily involve a center of political and economic power influencing its periphery? How are ideas of modernity negotiated between nations as political alliances and dynamics of power change? Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States from Futurism to Arte Povera: “Like a Giant Screen” reconsiders assumed answers to these questions by exploring 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, Exhibiting Italian Art explores 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, Exhibiting Italian Art establishes a more nuanced transnational approach. If art historians have documented how, as New York replaced Paris as the world’s art capital, Italy became a major avenue for US institutions and individuals to promote American art internationally, Exhibiting Italian Art looks in the opposite direction. Given the context of the unequal dialogue between Italy and the United States during a period of Americanization of the former, Exhibiting Italian Art focuses on the Italians’ projection effort: a contradictory response, which oscillated between fascination with the emerging dominant culture and antagonistic urge to attack the hegemonic center. My 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, in line with a general attitude, which was aptly described by Italian writer, Cesare Pavese:
American culture became for us something very serious and valuable, it became a sort of great laboratory where with another freedom and with other methods men were pursuing the same job of creating a modern taste, a modern style, a modern world that, perhaps with less immediacy, but with as much pertinacity, the best of us were also pursuing … American culture gave us the chance to watch our own drama develop, as on a giant screen.7
At the same time, the position of Italian art as an inner “other” within European Modernism (Italy was seen as both European and Mediterranean, industrialized and rural, colonialist and colonized; its main Modernist experiment, Fascism, resulted in failure) became a model and conceptual tool for American critics, artists, and institutions to rethink accepted narratives of Modernism in their own country. Retrospectively, Exhibiting Italian Art explores this countercurrent cultural translation process to historicize and decenter the formation of the art historical canon in the US-dominated West.
By focusing on cultural mediation across national boundaries, Exhibiting Italian Art brings to the fore roles and intellectual trajectories of artists, art dealers, and critics virtually unknown to English-speaking readership. Household names like Giorgio
de Chirico, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Celant, and Ileana Sonnabend are placed side by side with less canonical figures such as second-generation futurist Depero, anti-fascist exile Lionello Venturi, queer Jewish muralist Corrado Cagli, women gallerists and critics Mimì Pecci-Blunt and Irene Brin, and art historian Eugenio Battisti. In so doing, Exhibiting Italian Art provides a new transnational context of our understanding of Italian Modernism and expands current art historical discourse beyond Futurism and Arte Povera.
The redefinition of Italian identity in relationship to the United States underwent five key moments, each reflected in cultural enterprises organized to represent Italy abroad. Each is discussed in a separate chapter. By focusing respectively on an individual artist, state-sponsored cultural diplomacy, private galleries’ initiatives, and an art critic, each chapter explores specific methodological questions related to the process of cultural translation.
Chapter 1 explains how, despite his failure, futurist artist Fortunato Depero initiated the Italian national obsession with conquering the New York art world. The chapter compares Depero’s activities in New York between 1928 and 1930 to his fictional account of them. Despite his aggressive intention to “smash the Alps of the Atlantic” and use his art as “bombs against the skyscrapers,” Depero barely left his mark: in the midst of the Wall Street crash and its aftermath, his paintings failed to sell and his commercial enterprise, the Futurist House, survived only a few months. On his return to Italy, however, he created a myth out of his experience, writing extensively about his American adventure for more than ten years. He dedicated works in a variety of mediums to New York, oscillating between extreme enthusiasm about the city, which he saw as a futurist work of art as a whole, and antagonism or even anger toward it, as a dystopian actualization of futurist ideals. Depero’s ambivalent love affair with New York set the tone for the Italian debate about America as model of modernity during the 1930s and the reconstruction years after World War II.
Chapter 2 shows how Fascist cultural diplomacy provided a foundational template for the branding of contemporary Italian art in America. In the second half of the 1930s, as the Ethiopian campaign and the anti-Semitic Racial Laws had negative repercussions on American public opinion, Fascist cultural diplomacy began using contemporary art as political propaganda in the Unites States. To conquer the US public, Italian curators used methods they saw as American: they encouraged private initiatives (as opposed to government-sponsored ones), spot lit younger generations, women, and Jewish artists, and stressed stylistic diversity as a sign of an alleged artistic freedom. At the same time, the exhibitions emphasized a specifically Mediterranean modernity and the continuity between Italy’s modern period and its glorious historical heritage – a cultural specificity and a prestigious artistic capital that the “new world” could not claim. While this cynical and canny use of art helped Fascist diplomats in their mission to avoid political isolation and economic sanctions from the United States, the effort to conquer the American art world largely failed. However, by negotiating between “American methods” and Italian specificity to promote contemporary Italian art in the United States, the Italians actively constructed ideas of American and Italian modernities that would affect the national debate on modernity for decades.
After World War II, as discussed in Chapter 3, the contemporary Italian art scene was used to demonstrate the new republic’s political validity and cultural vitality in
a process of national rehabilitation and economic modernization – even though it was the Fascist regime that had inaugurated what today we would call the branding of Italian art. As America rebuilt Italy against the background of mounting tensions between the USSR and the West, a number of major shows and books in the United States presented a “New Italian Renaissance,” allegedly the fruit of the Allied liberation of Italy and Communism’s defeat in the Italian elections of 1948. The effect was to redeem Italy from its Fascist past, notwithstanding the many overlaps between the artists being advanced and those whom the Fascist government had promoted. The chapter focuses on the most important of these shows, Twentieth-Century Italian Art : conceived in 1940 in a Fascist proposal to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the show was held at MoMA in New York four years after the war. For Barr, Futurism and, more generally, Italian Modernism had to be distinguished from Fascism in order to define a post-fascist Italian identity and promote the cultural imperatives of Cold War America which equated Modernism and Western artistic freedom. Deeply affected by the legacy of Fascist cultural diplomacy and the cultural agenda of the Cold War, Twentieth-Century Italian Art paradoxically established a depoliticized canonical history of Italian art from Futurism to postwar abstraction, neutralizing the art and its history. At the same time, the show conveyed Fascist concepts of national regeneration and continuity with the Italian Renaissance, now re-framed in a Cold War rhetoric of Western civilization.
If studies of cultural diplomacy tend to focus largely on institutional histories, Exhibiting Italian Art complicates officially sanctioned initiatives by exploring the crucial role individuals played in establishing transnational networks, as seen in Chapter 4. Private initiatives were especially instrumental in postwar Italy: to counter the Mussolini government’s reputation for propagandizing, the Italian postwar government encouraged private galleries and foreign institutions to promote Italian art rather than doing it itself. As Italy moved from the decade of Reconstruction (1945–1955) to the Economic Miracle (1958–1963), an image of a “new Italy” emerged in the United States, largely shaped by those initiatives. By focusing on the transatlantic activities of art dealers Catherine Viviano and Irene Brin, I explore how they used contemporary art to construct the “made in Italy” label: gone was the redemptive rhetoric of a destroyed and impoverished country resurfacing from the war’s rubble; now a modern, glamorous, and pleasing façade prevailed. As Americans – including many artists – flocked to Italy to participate in the Roman Holiday phenomenon, contemporary Italian art played a key role in extending Americans’ perception of Italy beyond its old glories. Nearly a dozen exhibitions of contemporary art from Italy toured the country, while Italian artists like Marino Marini, Massimo Campigli, Alberto Burri, and Afro Basaldella conquered US collectors in Hollywood and the fashion world, seducing Americans through TV programs, movies, and illustrated magazines. By defining “made in Italy” as a combination of artisanal and industrial, locally rooted and internationally appealing, historically legitimized and glamorously modern, Viviano and Brin provided cultural validation for Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani’s “Atlanticist” diplomatic line (1954–1959): Fanfani promoted Italy as the bridge between Europe and the United States and a model for the expansion of the Marshall Plan through the Mediterranean.
The launch of Arte Povera, a specifically Italian reaction against “Cocacolonization,” on American soil dovetailed with the first transatlantic response to American hegemony – the social protests of the late 1960s. In Chapter 5, I conclude my narrative by
arguing that, paradoxically, the Italian art movement that most explicitly rejected the process of Americanization, Arte Povera, was also the first expression of a newly Americanized Italian culture. Critiquing Minimalism and Pop art, which they identified as major examples of US cultural imperialism, and rejecting consumerism, technocracy, and functionalism, which they saw as the main features of a newly Americanized Italian society, Arte Povera artists worked with live animals, poor, organic, and ephemeral materials, and organized public performances that Germano Celant described as a cultural “guerrilla warfare” comparable to Vietcong military strategies. By equating the Italian Arte Povera artists’ anti-American and antimodernist stance to the countercultural movements in Europe and the United States, Celant strategically turned one of the forces militating against the acceptance of Italian Modernism to his advantage. Italy’s subaltern role within industrialized Western Europe, its place as an internal “other,” gave Arte Povera artists a privileged position, even a status as an alternative model, within a global movement that rejected the negative effects of modernity, industrialization, and consumerism.
Forty years later, Arte Povera achieved the nationalistic venture of, as Depero put it, “smash[ing] the Alps of the Atlantic.” But whereas Depero tried (unsuccessfully) to overcome the Italian national complex about their backwardness by exporting his utopian modernization project, Arte Povera embraced that complex and made it a marketing tool. Simultaneously, the successful exportation of Arte Povera became a way for the Italians to interiorize an American perspective – Arte Povera was important because Americans said it was – and thus imported American models and parameters of cultural relevance into the Italian artistic debate.
My account opens with Depero’s arrival in New York in 1929 with his “bolted” book under his arm and closes with a similar scene 40 years later, when Celant arrived in America for the first time carrying his book, Art Povera hot of the print press. The strategies and outcomes of their respective operation could not be more different: to the confrontational nationalism of the former, the latter preferred the rhetoric of transnationalism; the former failed, the latter, we shall see, succeeded. In both cases, however, as in the other enterprises between these two ends, personal motivations dovetailed with nationalistic pride. More importantly, the promotion of contemporary Italian art in the United States served as a way for major protagonists of the Italian artistic debate to define and situate their modernity as Italians in the international context.
Exhibiting Italian Art builds most directly on the European and American scholarship of the last 20 years relative to my field of study, which can be divided into three groups. The first focuses on Fascism’s ambivalent relationship with Modernism in Italy;8 the second looks on a hegemonic American cultural influence on Europe during the Cold War; 9 and the third concentrates on the specificity of postwar Italian art and critical discourse.10 Exhibiting Italian Art unweaves the interconnections among these areas of study, therefore challenging two dominant trends in the literature. One is the idea of World War II as marking a break between Fascist and democratic Italy. Building on the scholarship of, among others, Emily Braun, Michele Dantini, Romy Golan, and Laurra Iamurri, who have examined the haunting persistence of the Fascist past in contemporary art practice of the postwar decades, I address the redemptive distancing of postwar Italy from the Fascist past as a construct of Cold War rhetoric.11 The other is the perception of the postwar cultural relationship between Italy and the United States as a one-way process of Americanization.
If art historians in the United States have focused on American cultural diplomacy in Europe, only recently has Italian scholarship begun to develop a transatlantic perspective. The most prominent examples are Sergio Cortesini’s One day we must meet: Le sfide dell’arte e dell’architettura italiane in America (2018), which looks at the exhibitions of Italian art organized in the United States by the Fascist government;12 and Celant’s gathering of primary sources, Roma – New York, 1948–1964 (1994, 2019).13 Neither addresses the continuities between the pre- and the postwar period. Studies exploring the transatlantic career of individual Italian artists, meanwhile, lack an overview of the long-term, collective phenomenon.14 Two volumes to which I have contributed essays – Francesco Tedeschi’s exhibition catalog, New York New York: Arte italiana. La riscoperta dell’America (2017) and Republics and Empires: Italian and American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840–1970, edited by Melissa Dabakis and Paul Kaplan (2021) – explore transatlantic exchange but, as multi-authored collections of short essays, lack the cohesiveness of a monographic study.15 Finally, Celant’s activity during the last four decades as the most prolific author and curator in Italy and in the United States on Italian art of the period has made his version of this history the commonly accepted one. Even if his method and interpretive framework has been contested in the last ten years, the artists seen as “his” still form the undisputed canon of postwar Italian art. It is only by considering Celant’s early role as the main advocate of Arte Povera that we can start to historicize his narrative after his untimely death in 2020.16 Claire Gilman has contested Celant’s theoretical framework to understand and discuss Arte Povera artists.17 In her dissertation, Gilman has specifically expressed the goal to overcome Celant’s master narrative and has criticized other art historians (for example, Thomas Crow) for taking Celant’s “agenda as an explanation of the work at hand rather that what it is: Celant’s own personal program.”18 But both in her dissertation and in the October journal issue on postwar Italian art that she edited, Gilman still relied on the canon and genealogy of Italian art constructed by Celant.19
An important precedent to my approach is Paolo Scrivano’s work on the transatlantic “architectural dialogues” between Italy and the United States from the Fascist regime to the Cold War. 20 In this dialogue, Scrivano has productively distinguished between Americanism, intended as an Italian “intellectual projection and imaginary space disconnected from the direct control of official policies,” and Americanization, intended as the process of transformation of Italy “shaped by the postwar political and economic hegemony of the United States.”21 If this distinction is central to my method too, a major difference derives from my focus on art. Unlike architecture, art did not depend directly on major investments, industrialization, or technological progress. It, therefore, lent itself to operations of bluff and to the ideal construction of a modern façade for Italy, independently of the country’s actual process of modernization. More portable than architecture and culturally more prestigious than industrial design objects, paintings and sculptures fulfilled a unique role as product of exportation aimed at conquering America.
From a more broadly methodological point of view, which goes beyond the specific cases of Italy and the United States, I challenge the idea of propaganda as a one-way action that affects only the receiving end by showing the transformative power that the making of propaganda has on the identity of its makers. Secondly, I question the idea of influence, ubiquitous in art historical discourse. What has been deterministically simplified as the phenomenon of Americanization of Italian culture and identity
is studied here as a pro-active and non-linear process of identity construction on the part of the supposedly passive object of cultural imperialism. This does not mean that I adopt a “ping-pong” narrative: for example, I do not counter traditional accounts of the impact of American Abstract Expressionism onto Italian painting by emphasizing the influence that, the other way around, the Italian Alberto Burri might have had on Robert Rauschenberg when the American artist visited Rome in 1952. 22 I, rather, focus on the historical significance of the fact that the success of Burri, Afro Basaldella, and other Italian artists took place in the United States first and in Italy thereafter; and so I explore the way they, or their American dealers, presented their art in the United States during the 1950s as Italy moved from the Reconstruction period to the Economic Boom. By doing so, this study goes against the apparently natural direction (the more powerful country exporting its art) and therefore complicates notions of hegemony and subalternity. Furthermore, the fact that these artists were recognized in the United States before they were in Italy made their response to American art (or lack of response to it) a more complex and significant choice than one of absorption or rejection of the foreign model. It was, rather, part of a larger set of changing criteria to construct and project their image as Italian and as international artists at the same time. This approach might be of little relevance to a teleology of stylistic innovation, but explores art’s role in the discursive and continuously shifting construction of Italy’s national identity and of transnational Modernism. By focusing on the exportation of the idea of contemporary Italian art to the United States, Exhibiting Italian Art both decenters the grand narrative of the “American century” and rewrites the construction of a modern Italian identity transnationally as a discursive and porous process.
Notes
1. https://www.italianmodernart.org/history/ (accessed August 15, 2021).
2. https://www.italianmodernart.org/exhibition/fortunato-depero / (accessed August 15, 2021). The show was also intended as a homage to Mattioli’s father, Gianni Mattioli, who was one of Depero’s lifelong friends and a major collector of his work. See Laura Mattioli, “Gianni Mattioli and Fortunato Depero,” in Fortunato Depero, monographic issue of Italian Modern Art, 1 (January 2019), https://www.italianmodernart.org/ journal/articles/gianni-mattioli-and-fortunato-depero / (accessed August 15, 2021).
3. Disclaimer: as the inaugural fellow at CIMA, I was involved in the Depero show. Research conducted during my yearlong fellowship at CIMA is integral part of Chapter 1.
4. https://www.magazzino.art/about (accessed September 13, 2021).
5. When Magazzino first opened, art historian Ara Merjian aptly commented: “No wonder … that Arte Povera is in the air these days. Its multifarious legacies – invocations of non-Western cultural histories as alternatives to late capitalism; explorations of ecological structures and natural substances; the notion that proverbial poverty is the antidote to our infelicitous exploitation of wealth – seem all too relevant in the present, when the relentless pursuit of progress seems to have left us sliding back toward the past.” Ara Merjian, “Taking Shape: Magazzino Italian Art,” Artforum, November 2017, https:// www.artforum.com/print/201709/ara-h-merjian-on-magazzino-italian-art-71771 (accessed September 10, 2021). The emphasis on how little-known is contemporary Italian art in the United States is a trope in Magazzino’s communication strategy. See for example the statements of the museum’s director, Vittorio Calabrese in Marisa Meltzer, “An Italian Art Haven Along the Hudson,” The New York Times, October 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/style/magazzino-italian-art-cold-spring-ny.html (accessed November 1, 2021).
6. C alabrese quoted in Meltzer, ibid.
7. C esare Pavese, “Ieri e oggi,” L’Unità (Turin), August 3, 1947, reprinted and translated into English as Cesare Pavese, “Yesterday and Today,” in American Literature: Essays and Opinions, trans. Edwin Fussell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 196–99. Writing in the postwar moment Pavese referred retrospectively to the 1930s (see Chapter 1). Original: “A questo punto la cultura americana divenne per noi qualcosa di molto serio e prezioso, divenne una sorta di grande laboratorio dove con altra libertà e altri mezzi si perseguiva lo stesso compito di creare un gusto, uno stile, un mondo moderno che, forse con minore immediatezza ma con altrettanta caparbia volontà, i migliori tra noi perseguivano.... La cultura americana ci permise in quegli anni di vedere svolgersi come su uno schermo gigante il nostro stesso dramma.”
8. I mportant precedents include: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). More recent examples include Germano Celant, Post Zang Tumb Tuum. Art Life Politics. Italia 1918–1943 (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018); Anthony White, Modern Italian Art in the Age of Fascism (London: Routledge, 2019); John Champagne, Queer Ventennio: Italian Fascism, Homoerotic Art, and the Nonmodern in the Modern (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019).
9. For a pre-2000 literature review, see Michael Kimmelman “Revisiting the Revisionists,” in Pollock and After, 2nd edition, ed. Francis Frascina (London: Routledge, 2000), 294–306. More recent scholarship includes, most prominently: Joan Marter, ed., Abstract Expressionism: The International Context (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015); Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Flavio Fergonzi, Una nuova superficie. Jasper Johns e gli artisti italiani 1958–1966 (Milan: Electa, 2020).
10. T he literature on Italian art with a postwar timeframe is vast, major publications in English include: Germano Celant, ed., The Italian Metamorphosis (Milan: Mondadori, 1994); Claire Gilman, ed., Postwar Italian Art, Special Issue, October 124 (Spring 2008); Adrian Duran, Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014); Sharon Hecker and Marin Sullivan, eds., Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying the Knot (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Until recently, Italian scholarship has tended to focus on the art produced within the national boundaries of Italy. A significant symptom of this attitude are the art history textbooks, from high school to graduate school levels, which have overwhelmingly Italian perspectives even when they treat art after 1900. The most popular textbooks, which have dominated the market until the first decade of the twenty-first century, influencing generations of Italian art historians are: Giulio Carlo Argan, Storia dell’Arte Italiana , originally released in 1968, the textbook was updated and republished in several editions through the decades (Florence: Sansoni, 2008); and Carlo Bertelli, Giuliano Briganti, Storia dell’Arte Italiana (Milan: Electa, 1986, latest edition 2010). They present Italian art as their focus with the rest of the world included as a contextualization to what happens in Italy. More recent initiatives slightly revised the old approach by situating Italy in the international context (but almost exclusively within the Western canon). The most significant examples are the three volumes by Federica Rovati and Alessandro Del Puppo, L’arte dell’Ottocento, L’arte del Primo Novecento, and L’arte contemporanea (Turin; Einaudi, 2013–2017) or the five-volume textbook, Salvatore Settis and Tomaso Montanari, eds., Arte. Una storia naturale e civile (Milan: Mondadori, 2019–2020). For a historicization of the phenomenon, see Stefano Chiodi, Genius Loci. Anatomia di un mito italiano (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2021).
11. S ome seminal works have addressed the problem of continuity between pre- and postwar Italy: Emily Braun, Mario Sironi, cit. (final chapter); R.J.B. Bosworth, and Patrizia Dogliani, eds. Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). More recent scholarship includes: Raffaele Bedarida, “Operation Renaissance: Italian Art at MoMA, 1940–1949,” Oxford Art Journal, 35, 2 (2012):147–69; Michele
Dantini, ed., Continuità/discontinuità nella storia dell’arte e della cultura italiane del Novecento. Arti visive, società e politica tra fascismo e neoavanguardie, monographic issue of Piano B, 3, 1 (2018); Emilia Héry, Caroline Pane, Claudio Pirisino, eds., Mémoires du Ventennio (Neuville sur Saone: Éditions Chemins de tr@verse, 2019); Raffaele Bedarida, Davide Colombo, and Silvia Bignami, eds. Methodologies of Exchange, monographic issue of Italian Modern Art, 3, 1 (January 2020); Romy Golan, Flashback, Eclipse. The Political Imaginary of Italian Art 1962–1970 (New York: Zone Books, 2021).
12. S ergio Cortesini, One day we must meet. Le sfide dell'arte e dell'architettura italiane in America (1933–1941) (Monza Johan & Levi, 2018).
13. G ermano Celant, ed. Roma-New York 1948–1964 (Milan: Charta, 1993; second, expanded edition: two volumes, Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2019).
14. On Fortunato Depero: Maurizio Scudiero and David Leiber, Depero futurista & New York (Rovereto: Longo, 1986); Fortunato Depero, Un futurista a New York, ed. Claudia Salaris (Montepulciano: Del Grifo, 1990); Gabriella Belli, ed., Depero futurista: Rome – Paris – New York, 1915–1932 (Milan: Skira, 1999). On Giorgio de Chirico: Emily Braun, ed., De Chirico and America (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1996); Nicol Mocchi, “‘Chiricos Checked:’ Metaphysical Art in James Thrall Soby’s Notebooks, Spring 1948,” in Metaphysical Masterpieces 1916–1920: Morandi, Sironi, and Carrà , monographic issue of Italian Modern Art, eds. Erica Bernardi, Antonio David Fiore, Caterina Caputo, and Carlotta Castellani, 4 (July 2020) (accessed August 20, 2021). On Afro Basaldella: Gabriella Belli, ed., Afro, the American Period (Milan: Electa, 2012). On Emilio Vedova: Germano Celant, ed., Emilio Vedova, De America (Milan: Skira, 2019). On Salvatore Scarpitta: Salvatore Scarpitta 1956–1964 (New York: Luxembourg & Dayan, 2016). On Michelangelo Pistoletto: Romy Golan, “Flashbacks and Eclipses,” Grey Room, 49 (Fall 2012): 102–27. On Francesco Somaini: Francesco Tedeschi, ed., Francesco Somaini: La stagione americana (Poggibonsi: Carlo Cambi Editore, 2018). Davide Colombo has published important articles on the artistic exchange between Italy and the United States: “Salvatore Scarpitta: on both sides of the Atlantic,” in, Salvatore Scarpitta 1956–1964, cit., 12–19; “L’arte americana dei primi anni Sessanta nelle riviste italiane del periodo, in Arte italiana 1960–1964,” in Identità culturale, confronti internazionali, modelli americani, eds. Flavio Fergonzi, Francesco Tedeschi (Milan: Scalpendi editore, 2017), 167–85; “Un caso singolare: Il mercato americano di Leonardo Cremonini durante gli anni Cinquanta,” in Ricerche di s/confine, VIII, 1 (2017): 21–45; “Transatlantic Exchanges. Piero Dorazio: Non-Objective Art vs. Abstract Expressionism?,” in Postwar Italian Art History Today. Untying ‘the Knot’, eds. Sharon Hecker, Marin Sullivan cit., 95–112; “Unfulfilled Hopes or Misguided Expectations: Peggy Guggenheim and Italian Art,” in Peggy Guggenheim. The Last Dogaressa , eds. K. Vail and V. Greene (Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection/Marsilio, 2019), 143–53. Kevin McManus has extensively explored the teaching activities of Italian artists in US institutions: see especially his monograph, Italiani a Harvard. Costantino Nivola, Mirko Basaldella e il Design Workshop (1954–1970) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2015).
15. Francesco Tedeschi, ed., New York New York: Arte Italiana. La riscoperta dell'America (Milan: Electa, 2017); Melissa Dabakis and Paul Kaplan, eds., Republics and Empires: Italian and American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840–1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).
16. S ee Benjamin Buchloh, “The Italian Metamorphosis,” Artforum 33 (January 1995): 82–83. Buchloh’s review is a first attempt at deconstructing Celant’s narrative, but it ignores the dialogue with America as a central component of such construct.
17. Claire Gilman, ed., Postwar Italian Art, cit. and in her dissertation, Arte Povera ’ s Theater: Artifice and Anti-Modernism in Italian Art of the 1960s, New York, Columbia University, 2006. Giovanni Lista, Arte Povera (Milan: 5 Continents, 2006).
18. Gilman, dissertation, cit., 4.
19. Gilman has acknowledged the importance of Cleant’s show, The Italian Metamorphosis: “This dissertation owes its existence to two events that took place during my first year of graduate school: the Guggenheim Italian Metamorphosis exhibition where I first
saw Pistoletto’s mirror paintings, and Benjamin Buchloh’s seminar on post–World War II European art which encouraged me to write about them. From there, my fascination with Arte Povera was born.” Gilman, dissertation, cit., p. vii. Still in the special issue of October that she edited, Gilman kept, unchallenged, the canon and the genealogy established by Celant.
20. Paolo Scrivano, Building Transatlantic Italy: Architectural Dialogues with Postwar America (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).
21. Scrivano, cit., 3–4. Scrivano’s method, in turn, is based on the seminal work of JeanLouis Cohen and Hubert Damish, eds., Américanism et modernite. Lidéal américain dans l’architecture (Paris: EHESS/Flammarion, 1993).
22. A similar approach was used, for example by Alan Solomon in his text for the exhibition catalog, Young Italians (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1968); and it still informed Celant’s books, Roma – New York, 1993, cit., and Italian Metamorphosis, 1994, cit.
1 “I Will Smash the Alps of the Atlantic”
Futurist Depero and Italian Americanism
Italian Futurist artist Fortunato Depero published two versions of his autobiography:1 Fortunato Depero: Nelle opere e nella vita (Fortunato Depero in His Works and Life) was released in Italian in 1940; a revised version substantially changed in content and structure was published in English in 1947 as So I Think So I Paint: Ideologies of an Italian Self-Made Painter. In both, New York played a central role. In the Italian version, the City of New York makes its first appearance in a description of Macy’s 1929 Thanksgiving Parade: “The most impressive and characteristic images of this commercial procession are the immense, swinging balloons … which represent human and animal figures. Flying elephants and lunar heads smile and float happily above the crowd … They seem to belong to a fabulous world made of huge soap bubbles.”2 The passage closes the book’s section on advertising and introduces the more strictly autobiographical part, “Brani di vita vissuta” (Fragments of a Lived Life). Here, New York covers by far the largest portion: 50 out of 80 pages. Depero gave even more importance to New York in the English version of his book. Published when he was ready for his second endeavor across the Atlantic, the book intended to function as “a good and useful introduction ticket” and to refresh New Yorkers’ memory about him (with some retouches):3
I went to New York in 1927 and stayed there till 1931. During this time I set up seven personal shows. The press took much notice both of my decorative art and of my painting [sic, more on this below]. The famous critic Christian Brinton introduced me to the public and to the most important newspapers. He also wrote the introduction to one of my catalogues in which, among other things, he says: “Depero created organic plastic dynamism transcending beyond specific groups and possessing a rhythmical vibration and an aesthetic manner of its own.”4
Such prominence given to New York is remarkable considering that Depero had spent just two years in the city (he inflated his stay in his memoir); a full decade had passed since then (two decades by the time of the English edition); and, above all, those two years did not coincide at all with the peak of his career. On the contrary, Depero’s stay in New York was largely unsuccessful and signaled the beginning of the artist’s misfortune in Italy too. A second interesting point is that New York is presented in the book as a lived experience, as opposed to other cities where he had resided. Rome, Capri, and Rovereto are discussed indirectly through Depero’s account of his artistic production in those places. 5 New York, instead, is the main character of Depero’s stories.
In this chapter, I do not intend to focus so much on Depero’s activity in New York, which has been explored in detail in a number of publications during the past three decades, 6 but rather on how his New York experience became so prominent in his life and oeuvre, starting from the artist’s own account of it, and why the fact that he attributed so much importance to New York is significant in the present book’s account of Italian projective efforts. In particular, this chapter discusses the discrepancies between Depero’s activity in New York and his account of it. This act of myth making is interesting for various reasons. On one level, it is useful to understand the artist’s strategy of self-promotion: a theorist and practitioner of “auto-réclame” (today we would say personal branding),7 Depero knew that his experience in New York was unique and valuable on the Italian art market. Secondly, Depero followed Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s lead when he trumpeted his alleged “triumphs in America,” which was part of a more general attempt to emphasize the Futurists’ success abroad in order to put pressure on the Fascist government to accept Futurism as State art.8 Ultimately, Depero’s ambivalent love affair with New York, as elaborated through two decades of writings and artistic production, was part of the changing debate on Americanism in Italy during the 1930s and, then, in the Reconstruction years after World War II. This was a major avenue for the Italians to define and redefine their own modernity, and Depero – in his idiosyncratic way – played a central part in it.
The First Journey to New York (1928–1930)
Depero had expressed his intention to move to New York as early as 1922, but it was only in 1928 that he was able to turn the idea into reality.9 He found encouragement from some industrialist clients, he met with deep skepticism from his artist friends.10 Marinetti especially tried to deter him. At that time, Paris was still considered the center of the international art world, and America was, at best, a profitable market. “I was told that there is no art in America,” Depero wrote.11 During his entire New York adventure, Depero regularly sent Marinetti reports on his activity. These often read like attempts to convince the revered capo del futurismo of the value of his American enterprise.
On October 2, 1928, while still traveling on the transatlantic liner Augustus, Depero wrote to Marinetti with typical optimism: “I will smash the Alps of the Atlantic, I will build machines made of light on top of the giant American parallelepipeds.”12 Everything looked promising to him. He arrived with his wife Rosetta at his side and his recently completed bolted book, Depero Futurista under his arm ( Fig. 1.1). This landmark publication was a collection of his past achievements and a showcase of his graphic abilities.13 Depero used it in New York as a portable museum and as a means of self-promotion: he donated it to potential clients and exhibited both the book as a unit and its unbolted pages in the Exhibition of the Italian Book at the New York department store Arnold-Constable & Co in November 1929 ( Fig. 1.2).14 He had also shipped 500 of his art works, with which he hoped to conquer the American art market.15
Through his childhood friend Ciro Lucchi, the artist had arranged a two-year contract with the New Transit Company to open his Futurist House in a hotel on 23rd street in Chelsea.16 The New Transit partners agreed to give him the space in exchange for a small monthly rent of $150 and a 20% commission on sales.17 The
Futurist House was to hold a permanent exhibition of Depero’s work and function, similarly to his former studio, the Casa d’Arte of Rovereto, as a workshop for the production of all sorts of things, merging the boundaries between fine and applied arts. His American business card listed: “Paintings, plastics, wall panels, pillows, interiors, posters, publicity, [and] stage settings.”18 Depero’s ambition did not stop there: as he wrote to Marinetti, his American dream was to open a Futurist school and then to found a Futurist village on the outskirts of New York.19
However, as soon as his feet touched American soil, the artist realized that things were more difficult than anticipated: he had to pay high customs fees for the 20 boxes of art he was bringing (indeed, he had to borrow some money to pay for that 20); then
Figure 1.1 Fortunato Depero and his wife, Rosetta, who holds a copy of the Bolted Book, on the rooftop of the Advertising Club in New York, 1930. MART, Rovereto.
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REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. The Cup and Pointal of a female flower.
2. The Cup and Chives of a male flower.
3. The Pointal and Seed-bud of a female flower, without the cup. T plant, a native of the Island of Cuba, was imported from thence, by Mr. J. Fraser, King’s Road, Chelsea, in the year 1801. It is, unquestionably, as handsome a plant as any at present cultivated in our hot-houses, and its continuing to produce fresh umbels of flowers, during at least nine months of the year, renders it, perhaps, the most desirable. It grows to the height of near three feet, producing but few branches. The leaves are extremely irregular in their form, and, when the plant is in a sickly state, the older ones are subject to be slightly blotched, on the under side. Few tropical plants that thrive with so little heat, or care; nevertheless, we have not any hopes, of its ever becoming a proper subject for the green-house; but as yet our experience on that point will not permit us to decide upon it. It should be
planted in a mixture of leaf mould, rotten dung, and loam; and may be propagated by cuttings. From a plant at the Hammersmith nursery, ripe seeds have been procured this year; they have the exact appearance of the seeds of the lesser Palma Christi, but rather smaller in size and have the same oily character. Indeed, there is so little difference between some species of the Genus Ricinus, and Jatropha, that botanists have been puzzled where to place them. Our drawing was made from a plant in the collection of the Right Hon. the Marquis of Blandford, White Knights, Berkshire.
Gladiolus with sword-shaped leaves, plaited and hairy; blossoms regular; sheath three-valved; flower-stem lateral.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. The three-valved Sheath.
2. A Blossom spread open, to shew the situation and direction of Tips.
3. The Pointal, and Seed-bud, one of the Summits magnified. T varieties, generally comprehended as such, of this species of Gladiolus, are extended, in number, beyond any others with which we are, as yet, acquainted, of this extensive genus. Already, we have drawings of 22; and many more, certainly, there are, even in this kingdom; but we shall content ourselves with figuring, in the Bot. Rep. 3 or 4, of the most curious. One of the varieties of this plant, has been in cultivation with us since the year 1757,
when it was raised by Mr. Miller from Cape seeds. The one represented in our present figure, was received, from Holland, in the year 1794, by Messrs. Lee and Kennedy, Hammersmith; it is one of the hardiest, and surest flowering varieties of the species; for there are but few of them which blossom freely. The bulbs should be planted in sandy peat, about October, and taken into the hot-house, or placed on a hot-bed, in January, to encourage a rapid and early growth; by which means, they are more frequently induced to throw out their flower stems the beginning of April, which otherwise, often prove abortive. The roots should not be removed from the pots, till the leaves are somewhat decayed.
This is the Glad. plicatus of Linn. Sp. Pl. p. 53; Thunb. Diff. de Glad, n. 24; Jac. Ic. Rar. 2. t. 237; of the Kew Cat. Vol. I. p. 63; Martyn’s Miller, art. Glad. 5. and of Willdenow’s Spe. Plant. T. 1. p. 220; yet, we cannot refrain from joining in opinion with the late Mr. Curtis that it approaches as near Ixia, as Gladiolus; for the Ixia rubro-cyanea of the Bot. Mag. is but a variety of this species. But we cannot so readily baboonify our senses, with trifling changes, as to think, with a modern reforming author, that a new genus was necessary, in this instance, to rectify this part of the Species Plantarum, of the incompetent! Linnæus.
Geranium with the leaves growing from the root entire and jagged; segments pointed; foot stalks thread-shaped; cups one-leaved; five fertile chives; root tuberous; flowers two-coloured.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. The Empalement, a little magnified.
2. Chives, natural size.
3. The same, magnified and spread open.
4. The Pointal and seed-bud, magnified.
T very handsome variety of the ragged-leaved geranium, is but little different from the purple-flowered Var. figured No. CCIV. of this work, Vol. III, except in the colour of the flowers, and that the leaves are rather more cut. It was introduced the same year to the Hibbertian collection, flowers in the same month and requires the same treatment, as the above variety.
